The Politics of Myth

Recent insights in economic sociology explore the role of future imaginaries in shaping market institutions and subsequent present-day economic behavior [Beckert Reference Beckert2016], while modernist historians open the door to considering how historical mythologies may impact contemporary identities and institutions [Anderson Reference Anderson1983; Gellner Reference Gellner1983; Hobsbawm and Ranger Reference Hobsbawm and Ranger1983]. Jens Beckert invokes Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities when he employs the idea of “imagined futures” in the study of market dynamics [2016]. According to this perspective, collective, socially-constructed future imaginaries resolve tensions in market expectations and uncertainty; these institutionalized social fictions in turn fuel modern capitalist dynamics [2016]. An imagined future changes behavior in the present and is necessary for capitalism to function, whereas an imagined past is associated with belonging and identity. These imagined pasts figure prominently in historical accounts of the emergence of nationalism. Specifically Gellner [Reference Gellner1983], Hobsbawm [Reference Hobsbawm and Ranger1983], and Anderson [Reference Anderson1983] each posit the nation-state as a contemporary social construct, emerging in tandem with industrialization. Gellner outlines how organically emerging “wild” agroliterate cultures are supplanted by a cultivated national, industrial culture, providing the homogeneity and mobility necessary for a uniform body of substitutable citizens [Gellner, Reference Gellner1983]. According to Gellner, national culture is education-based, literate, standardized, and substitutable; there is some historical base for the national culture, but this is used selectively and often radically transformed [ibid.: 57]. The modern era is the age of nationalism because “nationalism engenders nations, not the other way around” [ibid.: 57]. Hobsbawm and Ranger make this argument in even stronger terms, stating that nations are “invented traditions”, established during times of social, political, and economic upheaval during the late 19th and early 20th centuries [ibid.: 263]. These invented traditions were created either by fictionalizing parts of history or creating a new, forged narrative for political objectives: “a changing society made the traditional forms of ruling by states and social or political hierarchies more difficult or even impractical. This required new methods of ruling or establishing bonds of loyalty” [ibid.: 263], taking the form of invented political traditions rooted in ritual, myths, and a mythical past [ibid.: 283]. Finally, Anderson argues that the nation is fundamentally an “imagined community”, a social construct born out of the invention of the printing press and its consequences [ibid.]. Specifically, the printing press created a community of literate persons linked by a common vernacular, who constructed an imagined sense of connection with those they would never meet by sharing stories and propaganda through the written word. For each of these historians, the concept of national identity arose with industrialization, and is modern and constructed.

The emergence of national and cultural myths coincided not only with the period of state building and industrialization, but also with the emergence of market institutions and production regulation. I argue that these myths and traditions motivate actors and fundamentally shape institutionalized production structures, and that the institutionalized power of these myths serves to reify those beliefs. These “taken for granted” motivating beliefs are primarily referred to as “myths” in this article, due to their implications for collective identity and political mobilization [Sorel Reference Sorel1950; Gramsci Reference Gramsci1971]. The political functions of myths include defining one’s place in the world and providing a shared identity, guiding and rationalizing behavior, and orienting the view of the past, present and future [Gitleson Reference Gitelson, Dudley and Dubnick2018: 19]. Roelofs takes this a step further, noting that myths offer us a “shared framework of political consciousness” by which we become aware of ourselves as “a people, as having an identity in history” [Roelofs Reference Roelofs1976: 4].

Mythologies are thus an instrument of political identity and mobilization. Some contributors to this concept—including Georges Sorel and Antonio Gramsci—wrote as identity myths were mobilizing political actors and as market institutions were taking shape in Western Europe (1908 and 1929-1935, respectively). Like Roelofs, Sorel argues that myths motivate and create unity among groups, orienting them towards social transformation. Myths create profound emotional attachment to powerful narratives, supporting leaps of intuition which bind people together. For Sorel, myths unite, mobilize, and create a powerful common narrative and collective identity, yielding tangible political outcomes, such the general strike [1950: 127-128]. Gramsci develops upon the theme of the power of myths to politically mobilize actors. In his analysis of Italian political parties, Gramsci notes how “myths engender a ‘state spirit’, linking party members backwards and forwards in time to powerful forces which are “unknown... [not completely predictable] but which nevertheless feel themselves to be active and operational” [Augelli and Murphy Reference Augelli and Murphy1997: 30; Gramsci Reference Gramsci1971: 146]. Critically here, Gramsci adds a Janus-facing time dynamic to the construction of political institutions: mythologies create the perception of continuity between an invented past and towards the political future.

Belief in a myth shapes the concepts which become a part of reality and practice [Badenoch, Reference Badenoch2010]. In his analysis of the myths of European maps, Alexander Badenoch argues “it is not about how or whether maps ‘lie’ or misrepresent material reality”, it is that the myth shapes the conceptualizations of space which then become “a part of the ‘reality’ of infrastructures” [ibid.: 53]. He argues that maps are “representations of belief and ideology—rooted in particular cultures and institutions”, best understood as myths because they “mobilize representations of historically contingent circumstances and events as forms that signify them as universal, natural, and/or disinterested fact” [ibid.: 52]. Indeed these myths and “taken for granted beliefs” “are neither true nor false and can best be regarded as a particular form of what is often called ‘the conventional wisdom’ [Gitelson, Dudley and Dubnick, Reference Gitelson, Dudley and Dubnick2018: 6]”; “Myths are not lies. Nor are they detached stories. They are imaginative patterns, networks of power symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world. They shape its meaning” [Migley Reference Migley2014: 1]. According to Badenoch, maps have a “taken for granted quality” which actually shapes infrastructural outcomes, regardless of the validity of the belief.

We can observe similar dynamics in the luxury sector, where production is shaped by the “cultural wealth of place” [Bandelj and Wherry Reference Bandelj and Wherry2011]. Bandelj and Wherry define national cultural wealth as the symbolic resources—such as collectively held stories, symbols, traditions, reputation, and artifacts—which “confer benefits on those able to make legitimate clams to them in advancing their country’s prosperity” [ibid.: 2]. This “heritage effect” [Boltanski and Esquerre Reference Boltanski and Esquerre2017] tends to involve “the fabrication of more or less fictional histories” and provides value-enhancing narratives to “heritage” objects (l’enrichissement). These cultural representations of place can come from diverse causes—including an intentional effort on the part of the elites, or an unintended consequence of institutionalized practices. These narratives can be constructed through cultural events, such as festivals or events, and they can add value and status to an object that comes to be seen as being infused with this constructed narrative. These narratives can also be a cultural discourse, enforced by a property rights regime that institutionalizes a hierarchy of the status-infused “insiders” and a larger number of production outsiders [ibid.]. Once institutionalized, the “affect, narrative, and social performances are not merely the outcomes from the material conditions of existence but are mutually determining of those conditions” [Alexander 2003 as paraphrased in Bandelj and Wherry Reference Bandelj and Wherry2011: 18].

The wine market provides a unique case study into the cultural wealth of place [Ponte and Davrion Reference Ponte, Davrion, Bandelj and Wherry2011]. In the case of French wine, terroir—or the unique geographic characteristics and local know-how that underpin the national French appellation d’origine contrôlée (AOC) regulation—is said to be the reason why regulated quality French producers earn more than twice as much as their closest competitor. While wine producers and drinkers claim terroir exists, the vast majority of researchers claim it does not [Teil Reference Teil2012: 480]. I posit that the debate as to whether terroir is objectively real or is imagined is a false dichotomy. Terroir is rather a part of French myth, or a constructed narrative. These myths shape power dynamics across the supply chain, ultimately leading to an institutionalization of a more equitable distribution of supply chain power. The French wine market then shares a defining characteristic with the German and Italian examples previously noted: market power is not concentrated, but it is distributed amongst supply chain actors. This production dynamic, best understood as corporatist, supports differentiated production, which is deemed to be quality, “terroir”-based production. The myth of French terroir is reified not because of the intrinsic superiority of French land or grapes, but because a strong belief in a mythological cultural heritage shaped actors and their production institutions, leading to a unique product. But the French comparative advantage is institutional, not geological.

Terroir is a controversial concept; embraced by producers, consumers, and wine experts, while widely criticized by scientists, including many geologists and viticulturalists^{Footnote 2}: “Terroir is something that is perceived as real by actors and constituted by process. It is not that terroir is a lie, but rather that it is defined and experienced in a non-testable way” [Teil Reference Teil2012: 478]. Teil argues that terroir is part of a regime that emerges not from scientific process but from an “alternative objectivity” of prescientific (or “non-scientific”), collective knowledge. Viticultural professor Mark A. Matthews writes, “the idea that terroir is the source of fine wine flavor” is the “biggest myth of all” of the many French wine myths [2015]. Scientists who employ the notion of terroir are “firmly in the minority, if not the fringe” and their research accounts for less than 1% of the scientific literature on wine grapes [Demossier Reference Demossier1997: 199]. Yet terroir is “systematically cited by wine-growers, landowners, and wine merchants as the result of the primary influence of geology, which explained the reputation, the location, and the price of fine wines” [Demossier Reference Demossier2011a: 691]. Sociologist Geneviève Teil concludes, “Actors experience ‘terroir’ while scientists appear to be incapable of doing so” [2012].

How, then, to explain the dilemma that people claim to experience a difference between French terroir wines and their less expensive counterparts? Unable to find measurable differences in terroir, we turn to the social and psychological theories that apply both to wine and to the broader luxury market. Some sociologists argue that consumers create an idea of taste differentiation due to signals like price and the perceived legitimacy of the product, as developed though a historical narrative or branded image [Bandelj and Wherry Reference Bandelj and Wherry2011; Beckert Reference Beckert2011; Boltanski and Esquerre Reference Boltanski and Esquerre2017]. This perception has given rise to luxury markets which play upon product perception, placement, and price point: today many luxury firms seek to control distribution through vertically integrated “selective distribution” contracts precisely so they can control “the customer experience”, the narrative of the item, and the price [see Cleary Gottlieb and Hamilton, 2008]. Still others argue that input differences might not be objectively knowable, but people’s perception of a product imbues their experience with meaning, allowing them to experience a real difference in quality [Teil Reference Teil2012]. Here the “customer experience” is defined by producers and conveyed to consumers, either through state regulation [Teil, Reference Teil2004], through the dynamic interaction of similar producers [i.e., convention theory—see Eymard-Duvernay Reference Eymard-Duvernay2007; Diaz-Bone Reference Diaz-Bone2013; Boltanski and Thévenot Reference Boltanski and Thévenot2006], or through a type of homology [Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu1979) 1984].

Non-scientific factors, then, are argued by many sociologists to influence consumers’ perception of quality. However, the observation of this truism does not negate the existence of quality differentiation. If geologists and viticulturalists cannot explain a perceived difference in quality, that does not prove that qualitative differences do not exist. French producers and consumers believe in terroir, I argue, because terroir wines possess qualities that make them distinct. But it is not terroir that makes these products distinct, it is the producer organization that derives from a collective belief in terroir. Institutionalized historical myths and the power dynamics these institutions engender not only provide marketable stories to national producers, the stories themselves can actually support enhanced quality production. These myths became codified in regulatory institutions that shape production dynamics—especially the distribution of power among market actors in a given supply chain. This new distribution of power serves to protect the mythologized actor, input, place, or other perceived value-infused entity from intense price competition. This market protection and subsequent higher input prices shift production incentives, supporting differentiated quality production and reifying the myth. These reified myths can exhibit institutionalized hierarchies of insiders and outsiders, value-enhancing narratives constructed through festivals and events, and the prevalence of “more or less fictionalized histories”, reaffirming the so-called “heritage effect”. Producers are looking not merely to stabilize markets and protect market advantages [Fligstein Reference Fligstein2002], but to protect and stabilize what they perceive to be their heritage and their identity, especially during times of social dislocation. This argument fits with, but is not limited to, luxury markets, the heritage effect, and the cultural wealth of place. It can also fit other markets in which there is some sort of “cultural distinction”, in which a group of national or sub-national actors are perceived to have an intrinsic historical, “natural” or “God-given” production advantage.

The myth of terroir is critical in three ways for quality French wine production. First, it provides a salient political, cultural, and economic identity to unify and mobilize regional French wine producers. Second, the idea of terroir is institutionalized in local producer organizations. Finally, the subsequent supply chain dynamics which emerged from these organizations supports value-enhancing production incentives, such as higher-priced grape growing practices and wine-making techniques intended to emphasize the higher-priced input. I argue that these production incentives support qualitatively distinct wines, which are perceived as evidence of terroir. In the pages that follow, I demonstrate that myths can not only protect elite producers, but they can also create status and value for previously weak, fragmented, and heterogeneous actors. I further demonstrate how fictionalized histories can translate into market structures and subsequent production incentives. In order to demonstrate the centrality of myths in constructing comparative advantages, it is necessary to demonstrate that terroir is indeed a myth. I will begin with debunking the most common terroir myths. Then I will describe the revolution in French cultural identity during the Third Republic and the subsequent creation of wine myths and rituals. Finally, I will show the consequences of these myths on producer institutions and the resulting quality production incentives.

Birth of a Myth

So-called terroiristes argue that the historical usage of the term, along with a history of quality terroir wine production, demonstrate the validity and truth of terroir. I thus begin by challenging both of these widely held assumptions. In this section, I will first outline the historical usage of the term. I will then briefly describe its historical usage in three prolific wine regions of France: Bordeaux, Champagne, and Burgundy. The contemporary myth of terroir was cultivated principally by Burgundian actors, but producers in each of these three regions employed strategies to construct understandings that aligned them with conceptions of French heritage and traditional quality production. Champenois and Bordelais producers made claims to aristocratic consumption as a component of French patrimony, whereas Burgundian producers sought to market their wines in a manner that distinguished them from the saturated aristocratic lifestyle model of their Champagne and Bordeaux counterparts. Burgundy made claims to the local, the traditional, and the authentic as their “natural” heritage; in other words, they posited an image of Burgundy as a counter to “artificial” city life. This folkloric creation grew in tandem with the rise of the modern, precipitated by the development of urban life.

Terroir is a “dynamic and evolving concept” [Phillips Reference Phillips2016: 266]; or a “historically unstable concept” [Guy Reference Guy2003]. Over time the term has been employed to indicate a taste flaw (appearing in French dictionaries from 1549-1962), a communion-like transformation with a regional spirit (1880-1930), and its modern conception of something objectively measurable. The movement of the idea of terroir away from a pejorative and towards a laudatory term “coincided with the emergence of the appellation system” [Matthews Reference Matthews2015: 195]. Both positive and negative connotations of the term appear in a 1962 French wine dictionary, but by 1970 we see only the positive use [ibid.: 161]. The term has a long historical usage in France, but using the term to indicate a traditional taste and best production practices within a specific geographic region is a contemporary construct.

“Terroiristes” point to the fact that French wines were labeled with place names prior to the establishment of the 1935 appellation d’origine contrôlée (AOC) regulation which provided them with legal protection. Yet wine regions did not commonly use regional or local place names on wine bottles prior to the construction of the French railways (1860-1880) [Guy Reference Guy2003: 27]. In the case of Champagne, merchants prior to 1860 rarely used the word Champagne on bottles and “preferred the name of a prestigious vineyard” [ibid.: 27]. In Burgundy, merchants used an équivalence system, where place names put upon Burgundian wines were “not names for the origin of the wine but were stamps or standards of a wine’s quality” [Laferté Reference Laferté2012: 8]. These wines were commonly produced from grapes harvested beyond the place name appearing on the label. Similarly, a common wine narrative is that French terroir wines have a long history of quality production. But this idea too needs to be contextualized. High quality wine production was limited and a direct function of capital availability rather than superior plots of land. It is true that the price hierarchy in contemporary Bordeaux reflects almost the same price hierarchy observable almost a century prior to the 1855 regulation. The 1855 Bordeaux regulation protected the brands of historically wealthier producers who were able to afford expensive quality practices prior to the regulation; it did not protect the place where grapes were grown [Ulin Reference Ulin1996, Reference Ulin, Campbell and Guibert2007; Colman Reference Colman2010: 11-12]. The ranking afforded them additional market protection, enabling the continuation of expensive production techniques [Dion 1952: 422, as cited in Fourcade Reference Fourcade2012: 534]. While the 1855 ranking protected brand names, the land used to produce these wines was not regulated; and for the most famous chateaux, the land used to produce wine has changed over time. Thus price dominance is not evidence of the superior terroir of specific well-known chateaux.

The idea of terroir-based “traditional” French quality wines did not exist prior to France’s Third Republic. The movement to protect French terroir was, at its heart, a conservative movement to protect a myth of French tradition in the midst of vast social and economic displacement. Life on the commune was transformed in revolutionary ways under the Third Republic—impacting peasants much more profoundly than the 1789 revolution, and creating what Weber calls a “crise de civilization” [1976]. “Continuity has broken down… No longer an evolution, it is a true revolution that is taking place” [Méline cited in Weber Reference Weber1976: 472]. A revolution was also afoot in wine consumption and production. As of 1850, less than two-fifths of the French population had tried wine [Blanqui Reference Blanqui1851; Weber Reference Weber1976: 144]; at the time, wine was considered “a rare luxury” [Weber Reference Weber1976: 144].^{Footnote 3} Even in areas such as Nièvre—now synonymous with Pouilly-Fumé wine—wine was consumed only twice per year, at harvest time and during Carnival. Wine consumption grew exponentially in France after the 1870s, in what Weber calls a “gift of the Third Republic”. Specialization and increased product options were facilitated by road and railway development, and by the expansion of the military in 1889 [ibid.: 144-145]. The railways also facilitated the spread of the phylloxera pest, which decimated French vineyards in the 1880s and 1890s. This led to high grape prices during the crisis, followed by a glut of overproduction in the first decade of the 20th century. Thus we have a crise de civilisation coinciding with an economic crisis in France’s rural areas [Simpson Reference Simpson2011].

Rapid change spurred renewed interest in folklore, traditions, and the “noble peasant”: “the end of the century saw the wholesale destruction of traditional ways. It is no coincidence, surely, that this period saw a great spurt of interest in folklore studies” [Weber Reference Weber1976: 471]. “Peasants were studied as a vanishing breed; their culture was dissected and their sentimental value grew” [ibid.: 472]. Political and economic dislocation created pressure to stabilize the market and the community. The terroir myth developed in an “honest effort” to protect and promote the livelihoods of peasant winegrowers, initially in Champagne and Burgundy [Matthews Reference Matthews2015: 185-186]. “[T]he systematization and use of local place names in commercial practices is more recent, probably corresponding to a new form of self-protection in an increasingly open economy” [Fourcade Reference Fourcade2012: 526]. “Commercial considerations rather than concerns about wine authenticity in itself drove the French government to adopt a series of laws aimed to define wine” [Phillips Reference Phillips2016: 180]. The idea of terroir transformed wine politics in Champagne and Burgundy, both of which were characterized by a production structure in which wine merchants made wine purchased from grape growers. This contrasted with the structure of the Bordelais wine market, where houses tended to grow their own grapes and political actors remained opposed to market organization on the terroir principle, even after the adoption of national appellation d’origine contrôlée (AOC) regulation in 1935.^{Footnote 4} Yet terroir evolved differently between Champagne and Burgundy, according to their respective positions in the wine market under the Third Republic. Evidence of these differences are still observable today in the structure of producer organizations in the different regions.

Prior to the development of the railroads and the subsequent changes to the French wine market, elite producers in both Bordeaux and Champagne developed production narratives resonant with French appeals to hierarchy and aristocratic consumption. The myth of Bordeaux wines as having “God-given” superior wine growing conditions was constructed by a small number of southwest elite French growers to protect an early market advantage. Prior to the English occupation of Southwest France in the 12th-15th centuries, interior wines (i.e., from Dordogne) were regarded as superior in quality to Bordeaux wines [Ulin Reference Ulin1996: 9]. England granted special, extensive commercial favors to Bordeaux producers in order to “minimize resistance to their rule”, and as a result the wine trade flourished. The wine market development then resulted from “English hegemony and the city’s economic history rather than any special claim for climate and soil” [ibid.: 39]. Paralleling the ideas of cultural wealth of place and enrichment described earlier by Bandelj and Wherry and Boltanski/Esquerre, Ulin argues that the invention of the winegrowing tradition was the attempt of elite producers to create cultural capital. Following the termination of the special status and increased competition with Portuguese and Spanish producers following the end of English occupation, elite Bordeaux producers then attempted to construct an advantage rooted in appeals to place, history, aristocratic consumption and “natural” hierarchy: “Bordeaux’s ascendency… follows from a process of invention that transforms culturally constructed criteria of authenticity and quality into ones that appear natural” [Ulin Reference Ulin1996: 39]. Elite producers even built small scale replicas of chateaux in order to evoke the aristocratic hierarchy in attempts to construct divides between their production and that of peasant farmers [Ulin Reference Ulin, Campbell and Guibert2007: 52].

The small Champagne market similarly relied upon an appeal to aristocratic, luxury consumption in the years prior to the Third Republic. And in the first decades of the Third Republic, this promoted image resonated with French and international wine drinkers alike, enabling Champagne producers to sell 25 million bottles a year by 1890. But the newly constructed railways not only expanded Champagne’s market; they also brought inexpensive grapes to Champagne. Unlike Bordeaux producers, Champagne merchant houses tended to buy their grapes, leading to economic pressure and political tensions when competition lowered prices for local grape growers. Though rarely branded as Champagne in 1860, in 1890 we see the first call for protection of the Champagne name in defense of French heritage. René Lamarre, a champenois author and early organizer of local syndicats (unions), made claims to the importance of place and name, though rarely the term terroir was evoked: “within ten years, people will no longer be acquainted with the name Champagne, but with others… and it will not matter from which [grapes] these wines are produced” [Guy Reference Guy2003: 27]. Numerous claims to French traditional heritage were launched [see Guy Reference Guy2003 for an excellent description of these initiatives], as well as a strategy intended to politically mobilize growers and win the backing of the French state. For example, Lamarre rallied “protectors of the patrimonie” to organize themselves in order to defend their product from the threat of “foreign” Champagne merchant houses, which were alternately deemed to be either German or Jewish, depending on the political climate. According to Lamarre, local Champagne merchants were little more than “foreign feudal lords who wanted to turn the growers into serfs by buying up the terroir and monopolizing champagne production”, and he incited growers to fight against the “coalition of millionaires, almost all of them from Germany” [Guy Reference Guy2003: 104]. By 1900, champagne producers had “developed a rhetoric of national identity that promoted its own interests as those of the nation”, and their rhetoric “convinced government officials of the need to protect champagne as a national patrimony at both the national and international levels” [ibid.: 6].

In Bordeaux and Champagne, appeals were made to the aristocratic ideal. Burgundy, on the other hand, attempted to construct an idea of Burgundy as the authentic traditional France, represented by the noble peasant. Initially the notion of terroir was promoted not by growers, but from local Burgundian elites attempting to increase tourism flows from the new urban Parisian consumer [Laferté Reference Laferté2006]. Passed by tourists on their way to the Alps or the Mediterranean, an array of “traditional” food and wine festivals were created by local elites with the explicit goal of increasing tourism and linking “Burgundian commerce and tourism through the rhetoric of terroir” [Whalen Reference Whalen2009: 84].

Early 20th century Burgundy cultural activities provide evidence for Boltanski’s and Esquerre’s claim that value-enhancing narratives are constructed through cultural events, where the objects are infused with a specific cultural narrative [2017]. Specifically, a myriad of new Burgundian festivals and events “develop(ed) cultural marketing practices” intended to “articulate a rustic ‘fable of identity’ that provided an enchanted ‘sense of place’ and a restorative economic agenda” [Whalen Reference Whalen2009: 68]. Burgundians “developed the concept of terroir to identify the qualities of their wines in terms of geo-climatic origin and authenticated methods of production,” allowing “uniquely regional products to be marketed through a novel repertoire of wine festivals and gastronomic fairs” [ibid.]. These re-invented traditions include the Paulée of Meursault (1923), the Saint Vincent Tournante (1938), or the Confrerie des Chevaliers du Tastevin (1937). These ideas were further promoted through the Museum of Wine (in Beaune, created in 1938), Burgundy’s pavilion in the 1937 Universal Exhibition, the Gastronomic Fair of Dijon, and annual wine auctions at the Hospice in Beaune. The Paulée (a celebration of food and wine) was the first Burgundian initiative intended to link the myths of the vineyard, the grower, and terroir. Laferté notes that techniques used for naming dishes in the 1920s Paulées were only observed in Burgundian households some 40 years later. This, he argues, indicates that “traditional” practices were invented, intended for “cultivated middle class tourists enchanted by the regionalist discourse” [2012: 12] The major regional wine festival, the Saint Vincent Tournante, demonstrates both the methods local winemakers use to construct traditions for commercial advantage, as well as the centrality of ritual to the creation of these traditions and identities [Demossier Reference Demossier1997: 47]. According to Demossier, the landmarks along the procession were carefully chosen to “legitimate the concept of terroir” [ibid.: 54]. The Museum of Wine attempts to take a process which is neither natural nor static—wine-making—and cultivate a timeless image of Burgundian viticulture, with the unique terroir and the unchanging techniques of winemakers [ibid.]. The Confrerie, Demossier argues, intended to “draw upon a myth of an earlier Burgundian golden age of social unity” and the “enthusiasm for local folklore” [ibid.: 50]. The construction of these Interwar wine festivals “fulfil an important function in the construction of a local and even national identity” [ibid.]. In the context of a rapidly changing industrial France, place was becoming a marker of tradition, authenticity, and quality, for both Burgundian producers and their consumers, who attended these festival and events in great numbers [see Whalen Reference Whalen2007; Laferté Reference Laferté2012]. These events consolidated a unified regional identity while promoting the notion of terroir as the authentic, traditional production.

These “reinvented memories” of the discourse of terroir and its associated 20th century wine and food festivals were “presented as ancient, but were in reality born of the twentieth century” [Whalen Reference Whalen2009]. In his historical analysis of the development of interwar Burgundian regional identity, Philip Whalen notes that the development of a place-based folklorist tradition in interwar Burgundy is a “particularly salient” example of Hobsbawm’s “new social devices to ensure or express social cohesion and identity and to structure social relationships” [Hobsbawm quoted in Whalen, Reference Whalen2007]. According to Whalen, Laferté, Demossier, and others, “interwar Burgundians consciously exploited folk images and rural idioms to articulate an idealized, mystifying, and reassuring regional model of French modernity” [Whalen Reference Whalen2007]. Whalen explicitly evokes Benedict Anderson’s idea of “imagined community”, writing that interwar Burgundians intended to “animate residual social values, palliate cultural anxieties, mobilize political interests, and market regional products into what became a dominant model for French commercial regionalism”. Demossier concurs: “local wine-growers took the task of constructing tradition into their own hands” [1997: 50]. The result was an aggressive marketing strategy, uniting natural resources, historical memory, marketing strategies, and cultural performance into an imaginative and enduring form of commercial regionalism that other French regions have since emulated [Whalen Reference Whalen2009: 68] through the appellation d’origine contrôlée, which took Burgundy as its model [ibid.: 67].

These new myths resonated with French urban consumers, who also similarly faced rapid social change and took to a “stable” conception of an authentic, traditional French identity. Reinvented traditions provided a type of dialectical counter-movement to the changes occurring in France; the uniqueness of the village could be celebrated in contrast to the uniformization of the city [Laferté Reference Laferté2012: 15], the distinctiveness of French regions could be appreciated in contrast to a powerful, centralized state and the new homogenizing French cultural and linguistic pressures [Weber Reference Weber1976]. To both producers and consumers, “the (Saint Vincent) festival gives the impression of stability, creating a collective memory and provoking the recollection of past time” [Demossier Reference Demossier1997: 52, 54]. The idea of the reinvented past is dependent upon the creation of the modern: “tradition and modernity in the countryside are not so much successive historical periods as perspectives constructed simultaneously in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” [Laferté Reference Laferté2011: 681], “by inventing tradition and reconstructing their past, they define themselves and help to structure the identity of Burgundian viticulture in a competitive and changing world” [Demossier Reference Demossier1997: 54].

From Myths to Markets

The growing emphasis on shared regional traditional identities supported “a story of a seemingly collective and well-organized community, which in reality was heterogeneous and fractious”, creating “a sense of belonging and… mobiliz(ing) specific values to foster solidarity, rootedness, and cohesion” [Demossier Reference Demossier2011a: 702]. Demossier further argues that “the politics of terroir […] provided a platform for self-identification” [ibid.: 687]. Terroir mobilized producers and supported their identity as a collective entity with common interests—distinguishing them from industrial French unions, which were marked by Catholic and Communist factions. Jacquet and Laferté note that the “mass unionization of vineyard owners” led to a shift in power to from wine merchants to growers (“vineyard owners”) after the “republicanization of the countryside enabled them to take advantage of republican ideology when reshaping the legal framework of the market”. They conclude:

Identities and organizations coalesced in Champagne and in Burgundy, driven in the former by powerful, disruptive, violent strikes (1910-1911), and in the latter by their successful mobilization and active promotion of their reinvented regional identity.

As with Badenoch’s example of the myth of maps, terroir became reality and practice by shaping the conceptual map that forms dimensions of producer organization. Terroir and its reinvented regional identity are profoundly intertwined with the emergent collective identity and subsequent political power for growers. The cohesive political power of growers became institutionalized in the Comité interprofessionnel, the regional political body that governs French winemaking, and in the rules of the appellation d’origine côntrolée (AOC), the national agreement that regulates the comités. These structures—which are best understood as corporatist—institutionalize incentives for differentiated quality production. Specifically, the comités tend to equalize power between two previously unequal players; providing a legitimate and institutionalized structure for two formerly adversarial groups to reach agreement on production standards and prices. The local comité linked traditionally weak, numerous and interchangeable grape growers and the larger, more powerful wine merchants together in equal, separate bodies under a united production structure with a unique access to a place name (i.e., Champagne, Côtes du Rhône, etc). In order to use a geographic name on their label, merchants can only use grapes grown in a delimited geographic area. In exchange for the shared monopoly over the grapes grown in a given locale, growers agree to follow and collectively monitor precise and often expensive grape production protocols, especially as related to planting, pruning and yields. The regulation is written by the local comités themselves and it details precise “best practice” grape cultivation procedures. Unlike the divisive French industrial unions, unionized growers proved effective interlocutors for their members. They reliably enforce the quality production standards that unionized wine merchants demanded in exchange for higher grape prices. The national AOC regulation then protects these regional producer-created agreements between unionized growers and their wine merchant counterparts, mandating that Champagne wine must come from grapes grown in the Champagne region, that Chablis must come from Chardonnay grapes grown in the Chablis region, etc.

These regulatory “rules of the game” institutionalized the myth of terroir. Jacquet examined the establishment of the appellation d’origine côntrolée in Burgundy, reviewing 109 documents that the comité submitted to obtain legal recognition in 1935, the year the AOC was formally established [Jacquet Reference Jacquet2009; Laferté Reference Laferté2011: 690]. Each category identified in the documents related to an “imagined, idealized, and traditional aspects of local viticulture” [Laferté Reference Laferté2011: 690]. Laferté notes that in the initial establishment of the AOC regulation, terroir came to be solidified in national regulation in an invented, “strict regulation of the past through ‘usages locaux, loyaux, et constants’”, redefining the market and the product in a way that benefitted growers. The AOC agreements themselves codify and perpetuate the terroir myth: “the AOC system helped to fix the mythical image of an ahistorical terroir producing a wine with a taste unchanged since time immemorial” [Laferté Reference Laferté2011: 690]. And despite the strong centralizing and culturally homogenizing role of the Third Republic, the state actively supported terroir and regional corporatist organizations, as the “heritagization of a disappearing world was seen as a way to maintain social unity in a climate of social tensions and economic difficulty” [Demossier Reference Demossier2011b].

The structure of the AOC French wine producers is best defined as corporatist, as they are “stable and strategically interdependent interest associations that contract together to achieve a symmetry in their respective resources, and each association has a monopoly as an intermediary for the group they represent” [Streeck and Schmitter Reference Streeck and Schmitter1985: 126]. And as with German corporatism, this production structure facilitates trust [Lane and Bachmann Reference Lane and Bachmann1996; Bachman Reference Bachmann2001; Carter Reference Carter, Six and Verhoest2017], increases production prices, and ultimately supports incentives for differentiated production [Carter Reference Carter2018; Streeck Reference Streeck, Matzner and Streeck1991]. Specifically, these producer organizations and their regulation protect growers from market competition and enabled them to maintain higher quality and higher price production practices [Carter Reference Carter2015]. For example, Champagne grape growers have a monopoly over Champagne grape production, enabling them to earn as much as 6.20 per kilo (2018 prices, data supplied by Comité Interprofessionnel du Vin de Champagne). Champagne wine merchants pay more for their wine grapes than any other wine merchants. However, instead of making Champagne uncompetitive, the quantity of Champagne wine is severely restricted, leading buyers to bid up prices in the luxury market: Champagne sells for an average of €13 per bottle (price received by the bottler, 2017 prices supplied by Comité Interprofessionnel du Vin de Champagne), four times the average price of regulated French wines. This structure protects farmers, but wine merchants are better off as well, as both parties benefit from the restricted supply, the perceived qualitative difference, and the subsequent idea of Champagne as a status product.

Institutionalized beliefs change the distribution of power across the supply chain, specifically placing value with an inimitable, expensive input factor. Wine merchants face higher input costs, regulated oversight over the quality of the input factor, and a narrative that emphasizes grape uniqueness. Producers try to emphasize this expensive, quality-guaranteed input factor, rather than following the dominant wine strategy of trying to employ standardizing technology to correct or cover the quality of an unknown grape (Zinquisition, 2005, as cited in Corrado and Odorici Reference Corrado and Odorici2009].^{Footnote 5} Due to the strict production standards, the French appellation functions as a type of shared brand; consumers who buy a Chinon or a Beaujolais know not only the grapes which constitute the wine but also have a sense of the predominant wine style. This enables small winemakers to benefit from geographic origin as a type of brand recognition and some quality guarantee, though the power of the brand varies by region. But the efficacy of the shared brand and its benefit to small producers further supports the idea of the small scale, traditional paysan farmer.^{Footnote 6} Institutionalized beliefs change the distribution of power across the supply chain and create quality production incentives, leading to differences in production [Carter Reference Carter2018].

The rival conceptions of terroir as aristocratic and bourgeois (Champagne and Bordeaux) or as a link to the noble peasant farmer (Burgundy) created lasting variations in regional identity and market orientation, despite the same general regulatory body (the institut national de l’origine et de la qualité, or INAO) and the same emphasis on terroir, heritage, and the protection of traditional best practice. In Burgundy, where the idea of the authentic peasant, terroir, and the value of tradition was paramount, the region was divided into a multitude of small sub-appellations, a model favorable to growers. The Bordeaux model has combined brands, grower-merchants, terroir and their initial commitment to export markets to create a large production volume where ranked chateaux continue to dominate the market, co-existing with more generic regulated “Bordeaux” that scarcely earn more than vin de table (table wines). Champagne is the only regional appellation with only one appellation for all producers. Their comité best equalizes power between growers and merchants, and they represent the clearest (and most successful) example of a corporatist production structure, as well as the highest prices for growers and merchants. One can observe parallels between the historical power of terroir (greatest in Burgundy, weakest in Bordeaux) and the subsequent relative market power of growers versus merchants.