Structure, content and collective anchorage of social representations: Disclosing the imaginary around wines from traditional and non-traditional wine countries

To study the social representation (SR) of a given object, three main stages are required: the restitution of the content (product of an objectification by which an abstract object becomes something figurative); the structure (the organizing principles of the representational field) and the collective anchorage of elements (the principles of interindividual differences and their positions in the social hierarchy). Keeping this in view, the main objective of the present study was to reveal the representation of wines from traditional and nontraditional wine countries. For this, 201 wine traders coming from different parts of the globe were recruited at the ProWein Wine World Trade Fair 2018 in Dusseldorf, Germany. Participants were randomly stoped and invited to verbalize the words that came spontaneously to their mind when they were stimulated with the words “Swiss wine”, “Brazilian wine”, “French wine”, and “Argentinean wine” (wines from wine producing countries with different degrees of commercial prestige). A total of 1.862 words were evoked. The structure and the content of SR showed a convergence of the representation of Swiss and Brazilian wines and a clear opposition between these wines and French wines. Interestingly, an independence of Argentinean wines from all other wines was demonstrated. The collective anchorage of SR was influenced by the country of origin of wine traders. Differences were observed among participants coming from traditional and non-traditional wine producing countries. In short, the origin of the participants would be the catalyst for defining the social hierarchy in the formation of the content and structure of the social representations of the studied objects.