My interest in global business history and the alcoholic beverages industry antedates my time in the United Kingdom. Growing up in Portugal, where wine was for so long a major field of economic activity and a principal source of foreign trade, I found myself wanting to know why Portugal never created major leading multinationals of alcoholic beverages. For my MPhil (Mestre) degree at Universidade Católica Portuguesa, I studied the evolution of the wine industry, giving particular attention to the most internationalized sector, port wine. In so doing, I found that from the 1960s great changes had taken place in the industry that had led to the fast development of leading multinationals (though none, unfortunately, were Portuguese). These came to dominate the global alcoholic beverages industry by the early twenty-first century. It was from this research that the ideas for this book, based on my PhD dissertation emerged.

Writing this book was a pleasure for multiple reasons. Apart from unique wine, spirits, and beer tasting experiences and lots of traveling, I met a diverse array of generous and helpful people and made many very good friendships, which I am sure will be long lasting.

The two people who most profoundly shaped both my intellectual development and this book are Mark Casson and Geoffrey Jones. They certainly influenced my search for patterns and meaning in the immense amount of empirical data that I had collected.