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

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.