Owning a vineyard, in most wine-producing jurisdictions, places the principal on registers far more public than those of comparable assets in other industries. The appellation systems of France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and their imitators in the New World, are built on the principle of traceability. The owner of the land, the producer of the wine, and the negociant who handles the trade, are all known to the relevant authority and recorded in registers that, in many cases, are accessible to the public.

The land registry holds the title. The wine producer's licence, in France the Carte Professionelle, in Italy the equivalent agricultural authority, names the licence-holder and the property. The harvest declarations, filed annually, record the volume produced, the parcels harvested, and the producer's identity. The customs records track the movement of bottled and bulk wine across borders, against the producer's account.

The labels themselves are part of the record. A bottle of wine produced under an appellation system carries on its label the name of the producer, the appellation, and in most cases the property name. Where the principal is named in the property name, or where the family name has long been associated with it, the bottles are, in their way, an act of ongoing public identification each time one is poured.

The trade press, the wine writers, the en primeur campaigns, and the broader cultural attention given to serious wine, generate substantial secondary literature about named producers and their named properties. A property of any prominence is described in the major reference works, profiled in the trade and lifestyle press, and discussed by the critics who taste each year's release.

The work in this category is rarely about reducing the visibility, which the appellation system and the wine trade are built on. It is about consideration of the structures through which the property is held, the framing of references in the property name and the labels, and the management of the press relationships so that the assembled record reflects the principal's preferences for how the property and the family are described.