Did the European Commission Reshape French Wine Policy ? The Change in French Wine Interests and Experts under Brussels' Evolution

The French wine policy has recently taken an unprecedented turn towards Brussels. In 1970, French negotiators and experts obtained from the European Commission measures to secure their own, historical conception of “terroir” wines (also called “Denomination of Origin” wines). For decades, France thus managed to maintain a national, high level of control over their regulations. In 2007, however, it abided a wine policy reform based on WTO-compatible standards, and increased regulatory powers given to the Commission. The fact that France promoted, and obtained in the 70’s, nationally produced standards, while it accepted in 2007 international standards endorsed by the Commission, was a major policy shift. One way to understand it is to retrace the evolving relationship between national, policy-making experts, and Brussels’ demand for expertise.

Our hypothesis is, that Brussels’ evolving demand for experts has induced national standards-producing experts, to be outranked by international standards-complying experts, who profoundly reshaped the French wine policy. In the early European Community, French experts for “terroir wines” gained legitimacy among European officials, whose demand for setting regulations favored them. The situation differed dramatically decades later. Whereas the French expertise in “terroir wines” was fit to the Commission’s demand to set regulations in the 1970’s, it was unfit to international negotiations for commercial issues from the late 1980’s on. Brussels’ changing demand for new experts then played a pivotal role, as it slowly outranked former wine experts, and set the conditions for replacing them by market experts, who became prominent at the national level.