High environmental value certification and the politics of sustainable viticulture in France: Evidence from Champagne and Cognac

This article analyses how the High Environmental Value (in French, Haute Valeur Environnementale, HVE) certification became institutionalised as a state-backed sustainability standard in French viticulture, focusing on Champagne and Cognac. Situating HVE within debates on eco-labelling, audit-based environmental governance and corporate environmentalism, it shows how this public certification translates mounting environmental and health critiques of pesticide-intensive viticulture into an auditable, incentive-compatible form of regulation. Drawing on a three-year qualitative research project combining semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and documentary analysis, we show how public authorities, interprofessional organisations and major firms have promoted HVE as an accessible, flexible “third way” between conventional and organic farming, and helped scale it through collective certification strategies and its integration into incentive architectures, including eco-schemes under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). While HVE can support incremental adjustments across a broad range of producers, it often formalises pre-existing practices and legitimises a low-ambition definition of sustainability compatible with competitiveness. We argue that HVE should be understood as both an institutional success for its promoters – scalable, auditable and politically legitimate – and a certification framework whose ecological ambition remains limited.