Consumption, production and promotion of French and foreign wines through the world

Résumé du document

For a long time, France has been spoken of as the country of wines. Wine production and consumption is whole part of our identity and culture. Moreover, French wines benefit from a real image of quality, soil and top-of-the-range products. On the other hand, foreign wines are often perceived in France as bad ones, especially by the wine growers. However, today, we can observe an increasing influence of foreign wines on the global market as well as in France. Some countries like the US have begun to produce wines in huge quantities and to compete with some French wines. As we can see, wine is a specific product, especially in France. Nevertheless, we can emphasize three major dimensions to it, like for every other product: the consumption, the production and lastly the marketing or promotion. France, because of this cultural heritage, has a completely different approach to consuming, producing, and promoting its wines, than foreign countries. How then, do these three dimensions interact with each other? How do the differences of consumption and production lead to differences of marketing and promotion? How do cultural heritages and different techniques of every country influence foreign ones? At the outset, we will study the differences of consumption between France and the rest of the world. Subsequently, we will emphasize the differences of production (different logics and rules). And lastly, we will comment on how these differences have an impact on how wines are promoted and marketed in France and abroad.

Extraits

[...] How do the “foreigners” do to sell their exotic wines to cultured French people? First, to M. SCHAAF, it is important to notice that the part of foreign wines in French consumption is about 15% for more than 10 years and he does not see changes come at short term. That is to say that they are good to sell wines in the world, but that many french people are reticent. By the way, the methods are generally the same. [...]

[...] For instance, in wine-producing countries, they are not used to drink wine from foreign countries, which is actually relatively logical. In those countries only upper classes people can know and afford this kind of wine. It is not very common to see a bottle of wine from another country put on the dinner table. Most of the time, they drink these wines in typical restaurants (they order a Mexican wine in a Mexican restaurant ) or in particular events (in memory of something for example). [...]

[...] However, in terms of marketing, foreigners are inspired by the cultural issue that should be French's one. Indeed, to sell wines, foreigners favour closer contacts by educating, giving advice to the consumer, methods which look like a respect of a culture. Nevertheless, in France, people might think that they know wine because they are French and so, prefer buying in supermarket, in which stocking conditions are very bad and in which the only criterion of differentiation is price and no more quality. [...]

[...] Le vigneron A.Gaja a cassé la logique traditionnelle en introduisant le fût bordelais dans ses caves. Il y a donc eu une polémique : est ce qu'on doit laisser le cépage s'exprimer, ou bien élever les vins comme en France ? Cet exemple montre que le vin fait référence à un endroit, il renvoie aux origines. Il y a un autre exemple en Israël, dans le Golan qui illustre aussi ce phénomène. Pour coloniser le Golan, les Israéliens ont planté des vignes, pour faire du vin casher. [...]

[...] But after this selection, wine growers do an other tasting with wines which were rejected. Among those rejected wines, they select some: this one will become AOC wines Consequently, the process is biased, and quality into AOC wines is heterogeneous: you can have both very good and poor quality wines! Therefore, some wine producers have decided to leave the AOC and to become “Vins de Pays” Besides, the system of appellation in France is and more and more complex to understand for both French and foreign customers, and has a cost . [...]