Having Customers Share The Perception Of Quality Assessments On The French Wine Market

The wine market is a pretty paradoxical research object for the economical and marketing studies. In France alone, every year, hundreds of thousands of new brand differentiated products are marketed. How can so many brands survive to any rationalization process? The wine market is an interesting field case that helps us revise some of our most widely shared hypothesis on the empirical functioning of the markets. Which are the market procedures sustaining the happy encounter between a drinker and a wine? Is it the wine quality? Are there social distinctive processes? Is it a general opacity of the market? Is it the good adjustment to the consumers taste? In order to disentangle this complicated question and explain how consumer-product agreements are managed in order to perform sales and, at a larger scale, a market, this communication will draw back the evolution of the wine market in France during the last century. [WP-2007-013]