2005 GENERAL ASSEMBLY March 11, 2005, Paris Wine quality from the stake to the recognition procedures GENEVIÈVE TEIL (INRA, Paris) teil@inapg.inra.fr

Abstract Which are the market procedures sustaining the happy encounter between a drinker and a wine? Is it the wine quality? Is it its good signalisation? Are there the wine critics? Is it the good adjustment to the consumers taste? In order to disentangle this complicated question, this communication proposes to come back to the succession of measures that resulted in France from the wine crisis at the end of the phylloxera episode. Facing repeated crisis, the wine market actors did not stand without reaction. Next to the limitation of the production, the wine quality emerged as a major stake during all the 20th century. In order to help its recognition, it became first labelled. But soon, new difficulties led to reconsider the AOCs’ efficiency. Each new crisis brought in the same way critics of the old measures and new solutions. So, difficulties after difficulties, ever larger collectives proposed and set up ever more adapted procedures for the marketing of the wines. And the 20th century has known a series of procedures aimed at facilitating the quality recognition of the wines. But step by step, the authors acknowledged as able to define quality were changing, such as quality itself, and new market organisations appeared. Furthermore, the new solutions, far from sweeping away the old procedures, cohabited with them making the wine market appear today as a complex multilayered sandwich of market procedures. La qualité du vin, de l’enjeu aux procédures de reconnaissance.doc