Association of winegrowers with the aim of jointly utilising resources, processing the grapes produced and marketing the wine, thereby achieving the effectiveness of large-scale operations. These usually operate their own winery. However, there are also large co-operative wineries that work for several other co-operatives without their own winery. One of the most important of these is the huge "Badische Winzerkeller" in Breisach in the German wine-growing region of Baden, which is one of the largest in Europe.

The origins or rather the reasons and causes of such associations lie in the first third of the 19th century, when the profound economic and political changes of the beginning of the industrial age brought countless European winegrowers into bitterest distress. Liberal economic policy was met with a non-organised and, in many wine-growing regions, very poorly trained winegrowing community.
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Thomas Götz
Weinberater, Weinblogger und Journalist; Schwendi