The third and last of the series: The Corporate Winery

"You're from . . . Franzia?"

To conclude our series,  we will examine the type of winery that's responsible for most of the world's swill.  CORPORATE OH NO!  Skip the addled graduate student's anti-capitalist screed:  what passed for Soviet wine was capable of producing a hangover ten minutes before the initial buzz, and Hitler's little known attempt to produce a "People's Wine" under the motto "Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Riesling" wound up overheating the cooling systems of Panzer tanks.
Can we move on?

The Corporate Winery often began as one or more Authentic wineries, became successful and was purchased: sometimes by Jess' a vain ol' empire builder not content to have unleashed a tsunami of sweetened Chardonnay upon the cougars of the world, and sometimes by a multinational marketing company that has since changed hands so often that key cogs no longer know where some of their vineyards are.  Some retain some authenticity, but at least the winemaker's checks don't bounce.

Corporate wineries are usually successful at brand-building and Sales! and indeed, the wines sometimes increase in quality, though this is not the case if the Czar-E-O issues an order that no winemaker will be allowed to set foot in the vineyards without prior permission from the Kendall-Kremlin.  (More leaves and more clusters meant more wine and more money went his reasoning.) When they are not successful, it might be found advantageous to their Treasury (ahem) to inter thousands of cases of their wine (some of it excellent) in landfills because projections were missed and their Mafioso distributors returned the wine.
I did not make that up.