Wine quality in a cognitive economy: analysing designations of origin in León (Spain)

The Spanish wine quality model, based on geographical indications – particularly designations of origin – is giving signs of exhaustion. The difficulties of this quality model in protecting territorial incomes have its origin in structural processes of greater importance. With the development of cognitive economy, the interactions between the material and immaterial dimensions of wine valorisation processes have also become more complex and more difficult to handle with a rigid quality management scheme. Our objective is to explore the determinants of these complex dynamics, the extent to which a wine quality model is conditioned by new forms of value creation associated with the development of the new values, meanings and attributes linked to the quality of wine in a knowledge-based economy, and, finally, the new cognitive mediations emerging between the production and the consumption sphere, the actors involved in those mediations and the way they develop. We will study how two cases, despite being located in the same province and sharing the same quality model, follow completely different dynamics. In wine production, the material aspect is very important, but the immaterial aspect is becoming increasingly important.