Less is more: towards a discrepancy in the representation of ‘no added sulphite’ wines among French professionals and consumers.

As an emergent phenomenon in the wine market, ‘no added sulphite wines’ (NAS) are an ill-defined category for both consumers and professionals. This study aimed to identify the representation of NAS wines for French wine consumers and professionals and to understand how familiarity and expertise could modulate their representations. An online free word association task was used. Participants had to promptly verbalise the first five terms that came to mind for “NAS wines” and to rate both the importance and the connotation of each generated term. A total of 319 consumers representative of French wine consumption and 540 wine professionals from different French wine-producing areas were recruited. Based on the prototypical analysis, we calculated quantitative indexes from the data to identify the content of consumers’ and professionals’ representation, coupled with a co-occurrence analysis to determine the link between the different terms. By comparing the level of expertise, results showed a contrasted representation of NAS wines between French wine consumers and professionals. Consumers have a positive representation whatever their level of familiarity, mainly based on natural perception and health benefits. Professionals have a negative representation, mostly focused on defects, that is modulated according to the level of familiarity. For professionals, it is not so much the definition of the wines that change but the degree of importance given to the defects. Finally, these results confirmed the need for information and clarity to enable consumers to better understand what NAS wines are and to stimulate professionals to consider a common technical acceptability.