Jeanne Menjoulet [CC BY 2.0]
In southern France, the CBC's biocultural team collaborated with a diverse group of researchers and farmers to understand the relationships between knowledge, practices, and landscapes in the production of wines. We focused on viticulture because it involves perennial plants and therefore sustained relationships between humans and their plants over time, and because the world of viticulture offers a very diverse landscape in terms of practices.
Some winegrowers choose to cultivate, ferment, bottle, and sell their wine themselves; they control the entire production chain to guarantee the best expression of the “terroir” of their wine. Others prefer to sell their grapes to cooperatives, which are responsible for processing and marketing while respecting the collective specifications of the “appellation” (for example Bordeaux).
Therefore, we worked to understand wellbeing metrics of farmers delivering their grapes to cooperatives (i.e., cooperators) as well as with independent winegrowers who market their wine themselves. We were particularly interested in how changes in market forced impact winegrower well-being and how climate change impacts farmers and labels.