Humans and viticulture in Sardinia: The history and social relations as signs of identity of the wine-growing area

¹ Dept. of Science for Nature and Environmental Resources, University of Sassari, via E De Nicola, 07100, Italy
² Dept. of Human and Social Science, University of Sassari, via Roma, Italy
³ Dept. of Education, Cultural Heritage and Tourism, University of Macerata, P.le Bertelli, 1, 62100 Macerata, Italy

^a e-mail: gbenedet@uniss.it
^b e-mail: carbonid@uniss.it
^c e-mail: gianluigi.corinto@unimc.it

Abstract

The premise of this paper is that viticulture is an expression of history and social relations. In this sense, we embrace a post-modern vision of development that characterized both economic and cultural geography and agricultural economics. Such an approach does consider culture as an element of mediation between humans and the nature, placing it at the heart of the wine-growing territory. So history and social relations have influenced the today spatial densification by types of grape and the persistence, the reduction and/or disappearance of vines’ cultivations due to the different level of integration between humans and wine territories in the Italian region of Sardinia. In this region, there are selected areas where winegrowers have been forced to grub vineyards up, depleting the regional viticultural heritage, others–within which the fabric of the system of social relationships were denser–and where we saw a real rush to purchase of replanting rights for the expansion of the production surface for the increasing of production. The aim of this paper is to highlight the role of history and social relations in the determination of the structure of the regional viticulture through the identification and analysis of diverse case studies.