Partial delivery: Opportunity or threat for wine cooperatives

Numerous wine cooperatives exclude partial delivery by a strict and unexceptional full delivery obligation. However, in practice, some well-known representatives of the German wine cooperative system, such as Moselland eG, successfully follow the partial delivery procedure. In addition, cooperative members use various measures in practice to avoid the full delivery obligation, e.g. through the legal division or splitting of the member companies. Nevertheless, the procedure is currently barely investigated and researched, and since neither the DRV nor the auditing cooperative associations carry out surveys on the partial delivery, it is not possible to determine the exact significance of this for the German winegrowers’ cooperative system (Jung, ). Due to the current situation with regard to partial delivery in the German wine cooperative system, the aim of this paper is to present the concept of partial delivery and to discuss challenges for the cooperative system.