Landed value grabbing in the<i>terroir</i>of post-socialist specialty wine
A. June Brawner
Abstract
This article adds nuance to contested land ownership and ‘land grabs’ in postsocialist Europe in the context of protected sites of production: terroir. It calls attention to conceptions of land and value in these spaces, particularly in protected territories of specialty production. Considering the enclosed vineyard as an archetypical site of monopoly rent, I present a case study from a historic Hungarian wine region. Tracing the history of land tenure in the region, the privatization of terroir in the 1990s, and more recent state interventions, this study illustrates the need for contextualizing ‘land’ and ‘value’ in land grab analyses. Following recent land grab scholarship of this region, I argue that availability does not necessarily equal access, nor is ‘land’ limited to material resources. Rather, I turn to lived experiences of privatization to explore the dual nature of land as economic resource and collective heritage in a region of Euroscepticism and growing nationalism.