(Fortune) - Compared to France and Italy, Spanish wine has a marketing problem. What will it take to put the nation’s wines on the map?

For the genteel world of fine wine, it almost qualified as a barroom brawl.

It was a few weeks ago at a tasting of the top vintages from seven wineries based around the train station of the Spanish town of Haro, in the Rioja wine region. There, the “Master of Wine” who was leading the tasting, Tim Atkin, said that for Spanish winemakers to really get ahead, they had to label and promote their wines on the basis of the exact physical birthplace—the terroir—of the grapes found in them.

“The future is in the vineyards,” he said.

Later that night, at the tasting’s closing dinner, María Urrutia, the marketing director of one of the seven Haro wineries, CVNE, politely disagreed.

“First you have to put Spain on a map, then Rioja on a map, and we’re arguing about putting a small village [on the label],” said Urrutia, a member of the fifth generation of CVNE’s founding family. “It’s a way to make noise, but really, what sense does it make if a label doesn’t say Rioja and it says Logroño [the capital city of the region]? Who from Norway will know where Logroño is? You’ll be lucky if they know where Spain is.”

This may seem like a small difference of opinion, but it gets to the heart of the argument over how wine—and many other luxury products—are best marketed. How do you sell a product whose value is not defined by supply and demand, as with commodities, but rather wrapped up in its story?

The Spanish wine industry’s exporting issues, which have long been a source of concern, have come to the fore in recent years. Spanish wine exports have tripled since 1995, And last year, exports grew 22.4% to 2.3 billion liters, according to the Spanish Observatory of Wine Markets (OEMV), helping the country pass Italy as the world’s biggest wine exporter by volume.

The problem is that exports have been dominated by low-price/low-profit bulk wine, which accounted for 55% of Spain’s export volume last year.

Spain’s biggest market in 2014 was France, which bought 518 million liters of Spanish wine—for only €0.47 per liter (about $0.53). Much of that bulk wine shipped to France was then bottled, marked up, and resold as a French product.