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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the practices used by Australian wine producers to price diseased grapes. It explores the different understandings of what matters in market transactions, and which exchange relationships are to be valued, embodied in the ‘marginal’ valuation practices used by two wine producers.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will explore Australian grape and wine producers' attempts to value, and to price, 'marginal' materials - specifically, grapes infected with the fungal pathogen Botrytis cinerea. These grapes were marginal materials in the sense that their quality was deteriorating quickly, and they were therefore rapidly becoming worthless to would-be buyers. Yet they also lay at the margins of valuation because their material and commercial instability unsettled well rehearsed routines of grading and pricing in which the quality (and worth) of grapes is established through tasting and visual inspection.

The challenge of valuing mouldy grapes forced wine producers and grape growers to fall back on a variety of obscure and seldom-used techniques (such as counting the proportion of grapes visibly afflicted with mould) whose efficacy in determining the quality and worth of grapes was often open to question. But why did different wine producers employ contrasting, and sometimes seemingly ineffective, ways of determining prices for mouldy grapes? This paper will examine this question by exploring how two wine companies went about pricing these marginal materials - and specifically the different ways in which their employees went about securing grape suppliers' consent to judgments about the worth of mouldy grapes whose quality, and potential usefulness in wine production, remained deeply uncertain. It will suggest that these differences can be used to tease out these two wine producers' contrasting understandings of what is important in a market transaction, and of which sorts of exchange relationships are to be valued.