For wine producers, small is beautiful – but big is useful

Size isn’t everything in a vineyard – but it matters

When it comes to questions of size, there’s a kind of inverse-machismo at work in the wine business. Everybody wants to cultivate that sense of underdog, salt-of-the-earth, rustic cool that comes with being perceived as small.

At times, it can be absurd. On the one hand, you have multi-million-selling brands attempting to camouflage the scale of their production with suggestive back-label trigger words such as “artisan”, “terroir” and “craft”. On the other, you have niche importers and sommeliers bragging about the diminutive size of their latest acquisitions: “Two hectares? A few barrels? You call that ‘small’? This guy has less than an acre, on a 180° slope accessible only on horseback, and he makes just a few dozen bottles a year.”