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RESEARCH PRODUCT

The hidden face of expertise! Representations and descriptions of wines by different groups of experts in a vineyard in full evolution : the Beaujolais

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The Beaujolais vineyard is today in full evolution thanks to a policy of upgrading and moving upmarket. This evolution leads to the development of new mentions within the vineyard. This evolution impacts the Beaujolais wines but also the wine experts who are in the heart of making, selling and promoting these wines. Wine expertise has been studied extensively over the past twenty years. Most studies have focused on experts as a unified group versus novices to understand the effect of expertise on the knowledge and abilities of experts. However, it appears that within this unity, there are several types of experts with different backgrounds, knowledge, experiences, and professions: wine makers, sellers and critics. The objective of this thesis is to understand the effects of vineyard evolution on the mental representations and descriptions of wines of these different groups of experts. To achieve this objective, three studies were set up and carried out with three groups of experts recruited and separated according to their professional activities. The first study focused on the effect of vineyard evolution on the experts' mental representations, the second on the setting up and realization of the experts' tasting and the third on the effect of vineyard evolution on the experts' wine descriptions. Our main results showed that all experts rely on salient elements to construct their mental representations such as grape varieties, appellations or the sensory profile of wines. However, the perceptual learning and selective attention of each expert group lead to the construction of different mental representations between the expert groups. During the tasting, the experts use a highly codified common script consisting of a succession of automated actions that allow them to be more efficient. Concerning the evolution of the vineyard, our results show, for the time being, no effect of the appearance of the new Beaujolais Pierres Dorées appellat ion on the mental representations or descriptions of the wines of the experts.