To buy a bottle of wine at a lower cost, several solutions are possible: supermarket signs, websites, wine shops ... On bottles, the customer can easily find attractive labels, decorated with different medals or awards.
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In the store shelves, customers adopt strategies, such as Alain. When he chooses his wine, he takes into account several criteria including medals. Faced with "two rather similar wines, from the same region, from the same variety, at equal price," he admits that a reward can help him make his choice, to a lesser extent. "A price, it will influence me but it is not a determining criterion for me," he says.
The General Agricultural Competition Medal: a safe bet
The most credible medal remains the General Agricultural Competition , a serious prize, recognized and therefore reliable. In general, if the repression of frauds cleaned up in recent years in competitions organized in France, there are still pitfalls. For Thierry Desseauve, co-author of the guide Bettane and Desseauve , the most problematic is the quality of the jury.
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"The limit of these contests is always the rightness of the panel, it is enough that there is a leader of table with a voice which carries a little higher than the others so that everyone follows him blindly, as we taste precisely to the blind, he says, adding that "the table leader is not necessarily a very reliable taster".
As for the purely commercial mentions as "old vines" or "great wine", they may be, at first glance, reassuring but ultimately have no value.