The potential of gastronomic mediation to promote “Entre-Sambre-et-Meuse” wines

With climate change, improvement of the technics and the use of more adapted grape varieties, Belgian viticulture is currently booming. Wines from the “Entre-Sambre-Et-Meuse” terroir are getting particularly more attention, with some sparkling wines winning international medals (e.g. “Le chant d’Eole” or “Ruffus”). Although, there is still a long way to go to raise the public perception of this emerging terroir.
The goal of this project is to study the potential of gastronomic mediation to raise the public perception of “Entre-Sambre-Et-Meuse” wines and promote this terroir. Gastronomic mediation is a concept of pedagogic tool using gastronomy as an intermediary between the producer and the consumer by communicating about a product, its specifities, its preparation and tasting, through experience and knowledge sharing.
Therefore, gastronomic mediation workshops will be created around specific thematics that are currently selected. To achieve so, interviews of the “Entre-Sambre-et-Meuse” and similar terroirs experts are conducted to list the criteria that have an impact on the terroir perception. Then a statistical hierarchisation will help to select the most impacting criteria which will be used in the workshops.
After development, workshops will then be tested with public to analyse their impact on “EntreSambre-Et-Meuse” terroir perception. The goal will be to measure the difference of perception before and after the workshops, and characterize which criteria improve the perception the most.
With these results, we aim to help producers of this emerging terroir to reach consumers through a new tool to improve the perception of their product and savoir-faire.