Building Business Sustainability through Resilience in the Wine Industry

The purpose of this paper is to address how wine businesses build sustainability – the ability to survive and be successful over the long-term – in a complex market environment. To understand how managers in a wine supply chain (i.e. from grower to consumer) are trying to sustain business within a hyper-competitive industry, the authors used a standard grounded theory, constant comparative research method using formal depth interviews along with additional data sources from wine businesses in nine global wine regions in the USA, Australia, Italy and New Zealand. A framework emerged from the data to improve business sustainability and counteract the complexity in the wine market by developing resilience through innovating and experimenting, obtaining resources/developing capabilities and relying on supply chain connections. This conceptual framework contributes to the existing theory on institutional transitions and resilience in business, and extends and broadens it by proposing that resilience is needed to combat entropy in the wine industry for businesses in this industry to survive and thrive. Managers can learn from and apply the examples mentioned in this study and follow the framework presented to implement the strategies to build resilience to increase their chances of sustainability. This study is one of the first empirical studies to the authors’ knowledge that identifies the impact of entropy in the wine industry and examines resilience as a means to combat an entropic market and obtain business sustainability.