the European rules are not particularly strict and therefore also allow producers with a completely conventional approach to obtain it. It can therefore be said that organic certification can create a disharmony between consumer perception and the real quality of the wine, and ultimately even be misleading in the sense of creating expectations of the product that do not correspond to reality. Not only that: the risk is of a tendency to emphasize the Veblen effect, according to which, in contradiction to the laws of classical economics, an increase in price corresponds to an increase in demand. In other words, the Veblen effect is itself evidence of the tendency of consumers to build into their expectations a relationship between organic certification, price and quality, which may in fact be groundless19 . As for biodynamic wine certifications, for them - in contrast to organic wine - there is no public system of rules as well as a commonly accepted universal standard. Certifications, however, are for the most part issued by only two entities (Demeter and Byodivin) whose criteria are substantially similar. The effect of certification for the consumer is, even more so than for organic wine, an increase in the perceived quality index and, consequently, a tendency to pay a higher price20 . I wonder, however, whether this price premium is the result of the perceived quality, the higher cost to the wine producer, or rather the fact that biodynamic wines are particularly sought after by a segment of consumers belonging to the upper-middle socio-economic segment. Some studies, however, suggest that paradoxically, consumers with less knowledge of biodynamic wines tend to have a negative bias towards the labelling of the certification21 . A not dissimilar argument can be made for the most controversial of certifications, that of 'natural wine'. At present, France is the only country in which the indication of 'Vin méthode nature', certified by the Syndicat de 19 M. SIMEONE, C. RUSSO, D. SCARPATO, Price Quality Cues in Organic Wine Market: Is There a Veblen Effect? in Agronomy, 2023, 13.2: 405. 20 P. FANASCH, B. FRICK, The value of signals: do self-declaration and certification generate price premiums for organic and biodynamic wines? in Journal of cleaner production, 2020, 249: 119415. 21 M. DELMAS, Perception of eco-labels: Organic and biodynamic wines, in UCLA Institute of the Environment, 2010, 09-10.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTE4NzM5Nw==