440 WINE LAW II. LEGAL REGULATIONS: OBJECTIVE CONSTRAINTS We consider Wine Law as the group of norms dedicated to regulating the activity of the producers, those who elaborate and commercialise wine products. Such rules are meant to organise human conducts towards their own ends in a determined space and time2. As an object for such regulations, the viticulture has specific technical, cultural, economic and social features that can distinguish it from any other activity. It requires special knowledge of the factors that affect supply and demand, such as the soil, weather, plants and the producers’ cultural background. Thereupon, it is essential to consider the conditions of the viticulture as the object of legal regulations: a) Localisation: the activity is developed in poor soils among the Cordillera de los Andes, which has facilitated the settlement of populations in such dry areas, from the province of Salta in the North, then Catamarca, La Rioja, San Juan, Mendoza to Rio Negro in Patagonia; b) Lasting Cultivation: the regular characteristics of the cultivation, the slow production of new vines and the cultural rejection to its disappearance generate a tendency of inflexibility in supply, related to the inflexibility of the demand, which comes from the strong competition; c) Property Division: along the years, it is noticeable a tendency to fractioning the parcels, basically thanks to the equalitarian division in hereditary succession. All of these affect the possibility to constitute a viable economic unit, which results in a very wide smallholding or “minifundio”; d) Vulnerability: several circumstances affect and condition the development of the activity, among others, the overproduction cyclic (many times encouraged by bad politics of fiscal promotion), the drop in the consumption for cultural reasons, the lowering prices, the climatic incidents, plagues, the currency exchange rate that affects the exportation, the levels of publishing investment or the competence of other beverages; and e) Relative Price Sensitivity: the relative prices are calculated by variables such as the small producers’ capacity to finance the agrarian cyclic and the existing stocks to satisfy the demand. A significant volume of the table wines is destined to popular sectors, in which it has been, historically, verified an increase on the prices bigger than their incomes or, in such cases, a decrease in their acquiring capacity that affects the drop in the prices and 2 Edgardo Díaz Araujo & María José Iuvaro, Vitivinicultura y Derecho, Ed. Dunken, Buenos Aires, 2006.
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