Compromissos para a qualidade: projetos de indicação geográfica para vinhos no Brasil e na França

The Geographical Indications (GIs) are tools for valorization of goods increasingly used worldwide. This theme is a persistent agenda of the international trade negotiations. The regulation of GIs is one of the most prominent themes in the discussions relative to the organization of the global food system, especially because it involves issues such as intellectual property rights and market access. Opposed to a process of food production and consumption homogenization, the GIs seek to prize the diversity and singularity of products embedded in particular territories, highlighting the intangible assets as know-how, tradition, customs, practices of production etc. Nevertheless, it is a generic concept that makes sense to different contexts and social actors, including those outside of territory. In each project of the geographical indication is conformed to an heterogeneous sociotechnical network, where the concepts of quality are negotiated and different values are confronted. The institutionalization of grades and standards that enable the actors to transact is the result of this negotiation process in which commitments between heteroclite values are constructed. In the wine world, the geographical indications were for a long time, a concept which was associated almost exclusively with a style of production that was based in the prize of distinctive terroirs, through of institutionalization of rarity and traditional methods of viticulture and winemaking. However, the current changes in the wine global market related with the entrance of new actors and new qualitative conventions began to change the lives of terroirs and the concept of geographical indication. The adaptation of GI's in a new context has showed how this mechanism can be molded to different purposes. In this sense has showed how this tool can be molded with an instrument of qualification, in the wine sector where manifest a double process of institutionalization. First, the IGs have incited the valorization of territories and their identities, creating in some cases barriers to innovations that may reflect risk to the product uniqueness. Second, we are witnessing a process of sectorial appropriation where they are adjusted to serve as a catalyst for organizational and technical innovations consider necessary to the producers reacting to the loss of competitiveness in national and international markets. Thus, within a context of hybridization of competitive strategies in the wine market, these projects have reconciled conceptual models once antagonistic. For this to be viable, rather than reconcile tradition and innovation, the IGs are creating new commitments (compromissos) between evaluative principles (quality definitions), which manifests itself in a sequence of changes in production practices that range from the choice of varieties of grape until the definition of the methods of winemaking. The present research involved the study of seven different IGs in Brazil (Vale dos Vinhedos, Pinto Bandeira, Monte Belo do Sul, Farroupilha, Garibaldi) and France (Beaujolais, Languedoc), where it was done through semi-structured interviews, observation and documental analysis.