Taste and Knowledge: the Social Construction of Quality in the Organic Wine Market

The promotion of symmetries between consumers and edibles could minimize adverse selection problems in the market. The question is how to align differentiated productive practices, organic or otherwise, with consumers in the global wine market. Or put another way, how to co-construct quality conventions to link the informative and symbolic functions of food products. Addressing these questions involves a detailed analysis of the construction of quality conventions in line with the investigations developed by pragmatic social theory (Teil and Hennion 2004). Authors like Teil (2011) and Hennion (2004) defend the objectivity of wine, understood as a multifaceted object derived from the practices and perspectives of the broad spectrum of actors influencing its value chain. These include not only consumers and producers, but also distributors, sommeliers, opinion-makers, and wine critics who endow wine with added value by articulating its symbolic function (Teil 2013). Exploring wine as a multi-faceted object requires investigating tangible and symbolic aspects of the product throughout the whole productive chain. To date few studies have explored the relation between the objectivity of wine (its organoleptic properties) and the productive processes behind it, and even less its relationship with the socio-cultural factors promoting their differentiation in the more subjective sphere of consumption.