Hence, the cooperative was a democratic counterweight to the broker-controlled power imbalance, giving small growers collective bargaining strength. What makes a large cooperative with market scale fundamentally different from a corporation is the question of ownership and benefit. In a corporation, profits flow to shareholders who may have no connection whatsoever to the land being farmed. In a cooperative, profits flow back to the member growers themselves, in proportion to what they contributed. The land stays in the hands of the families who farm it, and decision-making is democratic. At their best, cooperatives can be a genuine alternative to corporate consolidation because the members have genuine proprietorship of the reputation of the coop products. The Italian cooperative tradition has demonstrated this at scale: from the certified organic collectives of Abruzzo to the Barolo country of Piedmont, cooperatives have enabled small growers to survive and thrive in markets that would otherwise have forced them to sell their land or their independence. In most early cooperatives, especially in the regions without prestigious internationally known appellations, the aim for farmers joining a cooperative was simply to make a living from the production of their vineyards. But as the wine market expanded, cooperatives proved that they could also expand and professionalize, investing in state-of-the-art equipment, building sophisticated brands, and competing on the international market.

Alba's grape market, in Piazza San Paolo, where small growers once waited for brokers to name their price.

Arnaldo Rivera was born in 1919 in Castiglione Falletto in a family of Nebbiolo growers in one of the eleven communes permitted to produce Barolo. He became the village's schoolteacher, served in the hills as a partisan during the Second World War and, eventually, became the mayor of Castiglione Falletto, a position he held for 37 years. In his classroom, he ran an experiment that would define the rest of his life: he persuaded his students to form a cooperative of hens, each child contributing one bird, pooling the eggs, selling them collectively, and dividing the proceeds. The experiment worked. At the end of the school year the children voted unanimously to dissolve it and sell the hens. In 1958, Rivera applied that lesson at a different scale. He gathered 21 fellow winegrowers from the Barolo communes and persuaded them to do what no one had managed before in the elite Barolo winegrowing region: form a cooperative winery.

It was not easy; the large wineries and brokers tried their best to undermine the effort to maintain their dominance and control of the market. But Rivera persisted, and by the first harvest there were already 362 members in the Cantina Terre del Barolo cooperative, and it continued to grow until by 1978, member vineyards covered 650 hectares where it has remained, representing about 400 member growers across all eleven Barolo communes. Rivera served as president of the cooperative for thirty years, until his death in 1987. In a speech at the cooperative's 25th anniversary, he articulated the philosophy that drove him: "a social entity that acts democratically by distributing its profits in proportion to the involvement of its members can be a winning idea, breaking down the preconception that men are destined to be armed one against the other in the name of personal privilege and egoism."

The Arnaldo Rivera label, launched with the 2013 vintage, is the cooperative's premium tier, born from a formal protocol between Cantina Terre del Barolo and a select group of member growers who agreed to identify their finest parcels, submit to constant agronomic monitoring throughout the growing season, and accept the possibility that an entire vintage might be sacrificed if quality is deemed insufficient. it is, in effect, a cooperative within the cooperative, with a quality charter that allows the collective to compete at the single-vineyard level.

The founder Arnaldo Rivera with a cooperative stock certificate indicating a share in ownership.

In 1931, as the world economy collapsed under the weight of the Great Depression, Robert Villepigue, who had managed the prestigious Château Figeac for more than two decades, gathered six other Saint-Émilion winegrowers and proposed something that seemed at the time in Bordeaux to be either visionary or desperate: a cooperative cellar. His idea was straightforward: Pool the means of production and share the vinification and bottling costs. Seven estates became the seed of what is today the Union de Producteurs de Saint-Émilion, an organization comprised of approximately 170 member growers farming 750 hectares, and accounting for roughly twelve percent of all Saint-Émilion production.

The cooperative has moved light years from being a scrappy alternative to the wine establishment in the Saint-Émilion appellation region of Bordeaux; it now has a professional administrative staff of 48, its own trading subsidiary, and a cellar equipped with 500 barrels, and its managing director sits on the Conseil des Vins de Saint-Émilion and the Bordeaux Wine Trade Council. It also has an art gallery, offers guided cellar tours, and produces wines under dozens of château labels as well as its own commercial brands. And, last but surely not least, it holds HVE — Haute Valeur Environnementale — certification, the French government's highest environmental designation for agricultural producers, a certification we explored in some depth in our sustainability newsletter last month.

And yet the essential structure of the cooperative remains intact: the same 170 member growers own the cooperative, participate in its governance, and receive returns in proportion to what their vineyards contribute. The land is theirs and the profits flow to them, not to shareholders. The decision to pursue HVE certification is a perfect indicator of what makes a cooperative special as it was a collective decision made by people who farm that land and will continue to farm it; hence sustainability is their end game.

Featured September Amaro Wine Club Cooperative wine: Union de Producteurs Saint-Émilion Saint-Émilion Royal (2020)

VARIETALS: Merlot, Cabernet Franc

The Saint-Émilion Royal is the Union's classic expression of the Saint-Émilion AOC, vinified with technical precision from a well-equipped professional cellar and the diversity of grapes from the vineyards of eight communes spread across the full mosaic of the appellation region.

The 2020 vintage was warm and concentrated, producing wines of depth and structure with excellent natural tannin management, a classic Right Bank Bordeaux: Merlot dominant, with Cabernet Franc adding aromatic lift and structure, aged in a combination of stainless steel and oak to preserve freshness while adding complexity. Expect dark plum, blackcurrant, and ripe cherry on the nose, with notes of cedar, graphite, and a hint of chocolate on the palate. This is Bordeaux at its most accessible; it’s not a house wine but nor is it classified growth, but rather a serious expression of the appellation made by people who have been farming it collectively for nearly a century.

FOOD PAIRINGS: roast lamb, duck confit, beef bourguignon, hard cheeses, mushroom dishes, steak frites, cassoulet, charcuterie

In the Swartland region of South Africa's Western Cape, on the granite slopes of the Paardeberg mountain, a cooperative exists that looks almost nothing like the two cooperatives we’ve discussed in Piedmont and Saint-Émilion. There is no shared cellar built by struggling farmers in hard times. There are no member growers pooling their vineyards for collective market access. What there is, instead, is a brand — Great Heart — entirely owned and operated by the employees of two of the Swartland's most celebrated wineries: Mullineux and Leeu Passant. Founded in 2020 by Chris and Andrea Mullineux, Great Heart is what its founders call a staff empowerment project: a label whose profits go directly to the people who make the wine, not to the proprietors who might otherwise receive them.

The winemaker at the helm of Great Heart is Gynore Hendricks, a graduate of the prestigious Cape Winemakers Guild Protégé Programme, which is one of South Africa's most important pipelines for developing winemaking talent from communities historically excluded from the industry. Gynore grew up in the Swartland, trained with Miles Mossop and De Grendel's Charles Hopkins before completing her residency with the Mullineuxs, and she was offered the position of assistant winemaker upon graduating in 2019. Great Heart is, in part, an answer to a question the Mullineuxs asked themselves: what does it look like when the people who make the wine own the fruits of that labor? The Cape Wagtail on the label, sculpted by artist Jaco Sieberagen, is a bird known locally for its selflessness and courage, qualities the team felt reflected their own.

Featured September Amaro Wine Club Cooperative wine: Great Heart Chenin Blanc Swartland (2021)

VARIETALS: Chenin Blanc

The Chenin Blanc comes from two sustainably farmed parcels of dry-land bush vine on the Paardeberg, with vines up to 40 years old. The Swartland has become one of the most exciting wine regions in the world over the past two decades, and Chenin Blanc is its signature white grape, especially on the decomposed granite soils of the Paardeberg, where the combination of old vines, dry farming, and cool Atlantic breezes produces wines of a richness and mineral precision that are unlike Chenin from anywhere else.

The grapes are harvested by hand and fermented with indigenous yeasts. Eighty-five percent is fermented in stainless steel and 15 percent in older neutral French oak barrels, and then they are blended and aged for a further three months before bottling. The result is a wine of character, with a nose of green and yellow citrus, white peach, and elderflower; textured and full on the palate. Wine & Spirits magazine described it as existing "in the clouds, floating and unencumbered." We would not disagree. This is a wine that tastes of a place, made by people who belong to that place, which is what the cooperative enabled.

FOOD PAIRINGS: grilled fish, roasted chicken, seafood pasta, Thai green curry, asparagus, soft and semi-aged cheeses, smoked salmon, summer vegetable dishes