Wine Law

402 WINE LAW the producers who need to turn to big wineries to have their grapes made into wine through their machines (the “ maquila ” system). These producers are thus subject to all kinds of abuses that lead to harmful winemaking contracts. By this Law, it was mandatory for the winemaker to register the contract, which was now restricted to public bylaws regarding the quantity of wine resulting from the relation grape-wine and the minimum alcoholic grade set by the INV as the average for each zone. These contracts should be registered in the provincial records. Nonetheless, despite such formalities, the situation of the conflicts persisted. The surpluses were then handled with measures of blockages and redistributions, with the wine of the third parties being affected. The socioeconomic conflicts result comparable to all the viticultures where wines of common use and wines with greater enological quality coexist; the conceptual systems of defence and professional representation never is definitely established. Regarding to the disparities of the market, fractionators and exporters claim for the need to guide the production to better quality, more integration of technology, more international competition and the need to propose the limitation of the compulsive offers. Simultaneously, the primary producers claim for the State’s intervention in order to establish a guaranteed price that covers the “costs of production, rejecting the analysis in terms of over-production or unsuitability for the demand and claiming more compromise of the public budget 8 . The State’s intervention in the Argentine viticulture has been extensive in the last century, with several measures taken to balance supply and demand, according to the ups and downs of the economic policies, either limiting or promoting, for instance 9 : a) the withdrawal of surpluses from the internal market; b) the promotion of removal of vineyards and limitation of plantations; c) the confiscation of wine lots; d) the unlimited fiscal promotion, which revealed, in 1979, a production of 35 millions of quetzales, an overproduction that ruined the relative prices; and 8 Mompellier, P. Bartoll, D. Boulet, Ph. Lacombe, J.P. Laporte, R. Lifran, & E. Mongaigne, La Economía Vitivinícola de Francia , IMRA-ENSA. 9 Ricardo Augusto Podestá, “La intervención del Estado en la Vitivinicultura”, in Edgardo Díaz Araujo et al., Crisis Vitivinícola. Estudios y propuestas para su solución. Anexo legislativo , Ed. Idearium, University de Mendoza, 1982.