The wine country, between landscape and promoting tool. The example of Chinon and Saint-Nicolas-de-Bourgueil vineyards (France)

When talking about wine, terroirs are never too far. The National Institute of Apellation d’Origine (INAO) defines it as a system inside of which interact a group of human factors, an agricultural production and a physical environment. This definition leads to see terroirs as entities deeply linked to the wine landscape. The latter is above all cultural, which means it was born not only from a land use outstand by the omnipresence of vineyards, but also mainly by men who make the wine, their knowledge and history. In a worldwide wine producing context, the notion of terroirs, full of culture and history, symbolizes the promotion of a product in an old traditional wine area. For this study, we followed the course of two Appellations d’Origine Conrôlée (AOC) situated in North West Touraine (West Centre of France), the Chinon and Saint Nicolas de Bourgueil wines. We realized a diachronic work starting from the end of the 19th century and the phylloxera crisis which marked a break in the French vineyard history, to nowadays strategies to face the new wines. This long lasting course naturally brought us to be interested in the links between terroirs and landscape. From this study, we concluded that the terroirs becomes the link between a more or less glorious past, which created an important wine culture, and a doubtful economical future. The terroirs notion flies to the wine economy’s assistance and perpetuates symbolic landscapes. On the contrary, the value of theses landscapes in particular thanks to the interventions of different actors such as the Mission Loire or the Parc Naturel Régional (PNR) Loire-Anjou-Touraine, takes part directly or indirectly in the promoting of the wine production and in the highlight of terroirs.