Characterising resilience in the wine industry: Insights and evidence from Marlborough, New Zealand

This paper examines resilience through a case study of New Zealand’s largest wine region following a damaging earthquake in late-2016. Resilience assessment for the wine industry to date has largely focused on characterising risks and responses as a function of organisational and business management practices. Less is known about socio-ecological characteristics of resilience and how these shape and influence response capabilities and capacity to low-frequency, high-magnitude events within the broader context of other risks. The research employs a resilience-based framework to identify and assess relevant properties incorporating a whole-of-value-chain perspective. The participatory approach includes semi-structured interviews with stakeholders, including wine business managers, wine researchers, industry bodies and others involved in the production and distribution of wine; document analysis (media and emergency response reports), and insurance assessments. Results show the earthquake had direct impacts on infrastructure, with indirect impacts and implications in particular for transportation and logistics, affecting the industry’s ability to mitigate losses. Resilience varies across the region and the industry, in part as a function of size, scale, and ownership structure of the operation, which in turn influences future levels of preparedness. Resilience analysis provides conceptual and methodological tools for assessing the capacity of socio-ecological systems to recover from shocks and stresses. The framework developed here provides a useful conceptual and theoretical basis for further assessments and can inform the design of resilience indices to monitor organisations’ capacity to absorb shocks and prepare for future uncertainty. This type of analysis can help identify system-critical vulnerabilities and sensitivities and inform the development of strategies to develop specified and general resilience in the face of multiple stressors