Re-creating economic and cultural values in Bulgaria's wine industry: From an economy of quantity to an economy of quality?

The transformation of the Bulgarian wine industry from a state-owned and heavily industrialized enterprise into many privatized wineries and vineyards following the collapse of state socialism involved the question of how to transform an economy of quantity to one of quality. At the heart of this question are contestations around the meanings and values of technology in wine production. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Bulgaria among wine producers and stakeholders of the wine industry since 2008, this article discusses the debates and practices in Bulgarian wine production to understand how different attitudes regarding technology and its uses affect the social construction of "quality." As a marginal wine-producing country with a compelling Cold War history, the Bulgarian case offers an interesting vantage point from which to think about the cultural economy of the globalized food system. I show how Bulgarian wine producers in the postsocialist era grapple with different systems of value and how technology plays a role in their construction. The resulting contestations and tension over technology in constructing meanings of quality show how technologies and systems of value intersect in interesting ways.