Enology and Food Farming System.

The course offers a comprehensive overview of the Italian wine and food-farming sector. Together with some basic quantitative information, the course presents trends, records of leading organizations and issues determined by innovation, quality and health research and existing policies. The course addressees, therefore, are the future food and wine sector operators, producers as well as consumers, and anyone who is interested in understanding the key aspects of this sector’s trends. The sector framework includes data on the production, distribution and consumption aspects, legal and cross-sectorial information (i.e. environment, health, etc.) as well as further studies including, for example, those focusing on packaging issues and on innovations regarding the production processes; these topics, in fact, have emerged as relevant factors in the evolving contexts of production and the segment’s market.

Through the voice of historians, wine-growing sector researchers, agronomists, oenologists and geneticists, the course addresses the topic of the rediscovery of wine-making in Southern Italy which enhances local varieties that are often forgotten and still rare. The course examines numerous local varieties, studying their performance in the field and ultimately testing their oenological potentials. The results of this broad research work, besides having direct impacts on businesses ‘winemaking productions, consolidate in a specific business model.

Italy has always been a leader in the production, consumption end export of wine and agricultural food products in terms of both volume and value. The sector, however, has undergone through the years significant changes on both the supply and the demand fronts, national and international. The importance and peculiarity of the sector have resulted in the development of a new area of economic studies that are delivered in this course. The course in fact, examines the working mechanisms of the food and wine market, the intervention of public authorities in the market’s regulations and rectifying failures. A new political economy of the sector shall be determined.

The course proposes a historical parallelism between Italian and French wineries. It begins with a journey among Italian and French wineries linked to the remembrance of kings, popes, leaders, literati, artists, preachers and even bandits that have made history. The formula is a history-economic mix focusing on the historical evolution of the most renowned wineries of Italy and France. A look to the future.

This course objective is to reassert the methodological approach of the food and wine sector, based on the analysis of the supply chains, while examining the “econometric-organizational” rules, the policies, the practices and the key players operating in the field. The supply chain is an important tool to understand, analyze and quantify the costs and benefits for each stakeholder (farmers foremost). The food farming and wine systems provide the regulations determining the leading positions among the various suppliers, the redistribution of the organizational “loads” of single players and the role played by the exogenous environment, especially on a local level.

The link between agricultural products, including processed ones (beverage), and their land of origin doesn’t just answer to the natural environment’s organic structure, in which farming based production processes emerge, and to their social and historical peculiarities, but it also reflects a specific cognitive learning of the relations between men and the territory itself, for some time recognized and culturally enhanced and transformed into a “knowledge” that is passed on and renewed. The course – starting from national legislations dynamics – reviews the contemporary juridical practice within a framework in which the issues of global competitiveness, consumers’ interests and rural development are closely linked.

In developed countries, the farming sector, heavily reduced by the industrialization process and the service sector, has requested a costly aid system, altering in time not so much the objectives but the tools of government intervention. The historical vision originating in the 50’s and coming through to today, highlights the different policies adopted, delivering results sometimes in contrast with the anticipated ones. Of such interweaving of problems – that have generated a relations’ system governed by international and EU bodies and with important repercussions on a local level – the course presents a systematic reconstruction, analyzing the players, the tools and the effects of the policies for rural development and food safety in Italy.

The food and wine marketing is brimming with potential, thanks to wine achieving a symbolic role among food products, and has proposed, in recent years, a multiplicity of grapes and wine “stories” which outline the processes of the plant and the drink as systematically interconnected successions: analyzing the biological, agricultural and chemical causes, the plant and the drink deriving from it, show to have followed, throughout history, paths that are completely independent from one another. In fact during Roman times, although grapes were cultivated with methods perfectly adequate to their botanical and physiological peculiarities, and in perfect correlation with the characteristics of the Mediterranean climate, the wines of the past were such, because of the subsequent manipulations of the must, to make a drink that would have sent Catullus and Horatio into ecstasy. Yet the beverage would be unpalatable for the contemporary wine lover.

The course objective is to analyze the food artifact “real made in Italy” as a comprehensive project: from the organoleptic characteristics to its form, from technological and organizational production systems to placement in a valorization, communication and consumption context, up to the complete management of the life cycle. Essentially, these are the same elements that mark the birth, life and end-cycle of any other types of goods (product / object / artifact, system or service). The course focuses on the peculiar aspects of Italian production, on the components and dynamics regarding functional, esthetical and symbolical factors directly linked to the collective imagination complementing production.

The course examines the realities of small Italian food and wine businesses, highlighting the commercial dynamics and marketing of the sector. With modern approaches, it analysis the market’s framework, the distribution system and sales techniques and the evolving trends of food production in order to understand how to optimize the presence of food and wine businesses in this market; from marketing research to the best segmentations, to the most effective and best targeted product placements, to choosing the most convenient strategies, to defining the policies concerning production, pricing, selling and distribution, communication and promotion. The course also examines the globalization process of the food-farming market, indicating the strategic plan for global marketing.