A union of winegrowers with the aim of jointly using resources, processing the grapes produced, and marketing the wine, thus achieving the efficiency of large farms. In most cases they run their own winery. However, there are also large cooperative wineries that work for several other cooperatives without their own winery. One of the most important of these is the huge "Badischer Winzerkeller" in Breisach in the German Baden wine growing region, which is one of the largest in Europe. The origins of such cooperatives date back to the first third of the 19th century, when the far-reaching economic and political changes of the beginning industrial age brought countless European winegrowers into dire straits. The liberal economic policy was met by an unorganised and, in many wine-growing regions, also by a very poorly trained vintners' class.
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