Scrutinising Spanish wine firms: an integrated view of their internationalisation process

The last decades have provided exhaustive evidence on firms’ internationalisation process with rich debates concerning specific theories, models and approaches that better explain the factors that impact such a complex process. The purpose of this paper is to analyse in-depth this process, elaborate upon an integrative model given the gradual, network, foreign direct investment and born global approaches and provide a comparison between small and medium-sized enterprises and multinational ones. To do so, we selected six Spanish wine firms, from the DO cava, using the case study methodology. The analysis reveals that firms’ internationalisation follows different paths depending on firms’ size, that lead to a successful internationalisation, where social networks and top management attitude are key determinants of international activities while psychic distance loses explanatory power in a network-driven and highly globalised sector. In addition, this study allows us to determine the best comparative indicators and contrast them with previous findings.