From quantity to quality? A conventionalist re-reading of Argentina's wine industry reconversion process

Abstract

This article revisits the so-called “reconversion” of Argentina's wine industry through the lens of Convention Theory (CT). While much of the empirical literature on Argentina's reconversion frames this transformation as a shift from a quantity to a quality paradigm, such accounts often leave underexamined a central question: how is quality defined in the first place? Drawing on CT, I argue that reconversion is better understood not as a simple transition from quantity to quality, but as a process of diversification and reconfiguration of the conventions through which wine quality is interpreted, justified and enacted. Based on a critical analysis of the literature, in- depth interviews and key policy and industry documents, the paper shows that the dual structure emerging from reconversion cannot be adequately understood without accounting for the changing constellation of quality conventions that began to take shape in the 1980s. Furthermore, owing to Argentina's sui generis status as a “New World old producer”—combining a long-standing mass-production and domestic consumption model with a late, export-oriented reconversion—the empirical analysis shows how this singular trajectory produces distinctive patterns of resignification and hybridization of quality conventions. This reading contributes to the literature on Argentina's wine sector by offering a more fine-grained interpretation of a pivotal historical process and advances CT through the further development of wine-specific ideal-typical quality conventions and the identification of original processes of resignification and hybridization in a “New World old producer” context.