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Cet article aborde l’exploitation d’une publication mensuelle dans le cadre d’une profession aux besoins spécifiques en matière d’information, ainsi que le rôle de cette même publication dans la défense des intérêts des membres de cette profession. Au delà des informations relayées, l’effort de promotion est très net, en vue notamment de permettre l’écoulement des marchandises produites dans des régions aux intérêts parfois divergents. Ces tensions sont source de conflits internes dans un contexte de l’entre-deux-guerres où le marché des boissons alcoolisées est porteur. This paper questions the uses of a professional monthly publication in a sector where information was crucial. It inquires as well into the role of this publication as a defender of professional interests. Above these two main functions, the journal’s propaganda effort is made clear, especially as a means of ensuring the sale of products from various regions, sometimes with conflicted interests in an interwar context where the alcoholic beverages market was booming.

The project of a book collecting papers about different European wine regions was developed during Spring 2017 by Paolo Tedeschi and Manuel Vaquero Pineiro, scholars in economic history and members of the informal group of research about the Italian Oeno-History.

The article deals with understanding recent reconsideration of the hierarchy of the French wines. In about fifty years, the AOC label ceased to provide the most favourable economic positions, contrary to certain table wines. How different categories of wines, that the professional and the State contributed to segment in two market in the first half of the twentieth century, could have evolved until calling into question the AOC wine, former institutionalized model of excellence? In order to understand how each market evolved to this conclusion, we provide basic tools for comparing the market under the same grid. Gironde and Languedoc-Roussillon constitute two convenient cases for applying it. The—undesired—incidence of the European instruments of public action on the sectoral evolution is clear. By analysing the effects of the installation of sectoral legislation, then the substantial modification of the European regulations in 1985, we understand how the regulatory change induced the emergence of new collective and economic strategies leading to reconsider AOC wines.