Lying in Peru's Osmore River valley, Moquegua grew during the colonial period due to its production of wine and brandy. Although a small, relatively anonymous town of less than 10,000 inhabitants even in the late 1700s, it sold hundreds of thousands of pesos’ worth of wine and brandy each year to markets in Upper Peru, including the great silver mining district of Potosí.

In the 1980s archaeologist Prudence Rice began to participate in the Moquegua Bodegas Project, which aimed to study the material remains of the valley's vineyards, wine cellars and brandy distillation plants. In all Rice and her associates found 130 bodegas in the valley and carried out excavations at more than 40 of them. Vintage Moquegua represents the culmination of more than three decades of her analysis and writing on the historical archaeology of Moquegua's viti-viniculture. The outstanding result ‘is a socioeconomic micro-history set in a colonial periphery’ (p. 261), which through Rice's multi-disciplinary efforts shows how viticulture transformed Moquegua and firmly tied the valley to the viceroyalty and the emerging capitalist world economy.

As an archaeologist, Rice dutifully lays out the theoretical models for her study: world-systems, centre-periphery, frontier and actor-network theories all provide perspectives for her discussion of how wine and brandy transformed Moquegua. Rice provides an informative overview of the history of wine and how as an essential element of Spanish culture its production and consumption were transferred to the New World colonies. She resists portraying wine cultivation through a religious or symbolic prism but interprets it instead, perhaps with some exaggeration, as an economic force that rivalled silver in the expansion of world capitalism. Rice devotes considerable space to chronicling the main events in Spanish overseas expansion, particularly as they resulted in the conquest of the indigenous inhabitants of Peru and eventually in the settlement of Moquegua and the introduction of grape vines there by the 1560s. Historians will find little that is new in those chapters on Spanish overseas expansion except where she brings Moquegua onto the stage.

While others have analysed the settlement of Moquegua and the dimensions of its wine and brandy trade with Upper Peru, Rice skilfully integrates those studies into a detailed discussion of the dimensions of viticulture there and what the artefacts unearthed at the bodegas and distilleries reveal about changes in the material culture of the valley. She also uses colonial documentation about the bodegas found in the Moquegua municipal archive.

Wine was, of course, an essential element in Spaniards’ culture and diet, and Spanish colonists insisted on having wine for religious reasons as well as for their tables. Indigenous corn beer (chicha) lacked wine's symbolic value for Catholics; neither could it satisfy the Spanish palate's longing for wine. As a result, Spaniards began establishing vineyards soon after the conquest of Peru, despite sporadic attempts by the crown to prohibit American wine production and thereby protect the colonial market for Spanish producers. Rice provides scholars with a useful reference list of laws, edicts and taxes related to royal efforts to regulate viticulture. Attempts to prevent the growth of Andean viticulture failed, however, and within the viceroyalty of Peru three main centres of wine production emerged (Peru, including both the Yca-Pisco region and the Arequipa-Moquegua zone; central Chile; and western Argentina), although Rice says little about the competition or other dynamics between the Peruvian and non-Peruvian zones. Little by little, wine and then brandy, both of which were initially libations for the Spanish elite, expanded into the popular market. By the 1700s demand for wine and brandy had grown to such a level that, according to Rice's estimates, Moquegua was producing at least seven million litres of wine per year. Most of it was distilled into brandy.

Rice's study of ceramics and other material remains found in Moquegua helps her understand life in the bodegas more clearly. The tinajas (large ceramic vats used for storing wine) were evidently made and fired by itinerate craftsmen. Some owners lived at their bodegas rather than in the town. Rice found little physical evidence of livestock, indicating that teams for carrying the wine and brandy were hired rather than maintained on-site. Domestic ceramics from the late 1700s show that Moquegua families were using British wares, indicating that Moquegua's viticulture enabled local consumers to purchase imported merchandise once imperial trade restrictions were eased.

In addition to showing how a small and seemingly peripheral region such as Moquegua could be so intensively integrated into the world economy, Rice's work opens up further avenues for research. For example, although she discusses briefly some of the elite families in early Moquegua, she apparently lacks the information to detail over time their involvement in the production and commerce of wine and brandy. It would be valuable for historians to analyse existing colonial notarial records to learn how vineyards passed from generation to generation, what vintners did with their profits, how owners obtained seasonal labour for their estates, and what arrangements they had with the teamsters who hauled the wine and brandy to La Paz and Potosí. As Rice herself suggests, further study is also needed on how indigenous Andeans understood wine: did it come to have the same meanings for them as it did for the Spaniards?

Rice's excellent book offers a taste of what history and archaeology, when combined, might offer for other colonial Andean sites. For good reason, archaeologists have tended to focus on the remains of the Andean indigenist past. But there are important opportunities for the study of colonial industrial remains besides those at Moquegua. At Huancavelica, for example, miners produced mercury, which was then shipped to Potosí and other silver mining districts in order to process the ores through amalgamation. The ovens used to distil mercury and other mining ruins dot Huancavelica and would make rich objects of study for historical archaeology. It is hoped that Rice's work will lead to similar studies of colonial industrial and economic life.