Fertile Pairings: A Cultural History of the Early Commercial Mandate of the Société des alcools du Québec (1968–1978)

Abstract

This article sheds light on wine sales in Quebec after the creation of the Société des alcools du Québec (SAQ) in 1971. Wine blended with the state’s economic and nationalistic orientations and helped legitimize the profitability of the SAQ. Not only did it become the perfect vehicle to replace the temperance code of moral conduct based on respectability with a new hedonistic one projected onto the trope of middle-class modernity, but it also allowed for a reinvestment in Quebec’s French genealogy in a context of national and linguistic affirmation. This is the story of how a consumer product, whose popularity is rather recent, carved out a place for itself in Quebec’s modern identity. This place, which was neither inevitable nor self-evident, appears to be the result of cultural, economic, and political ambitions and opportunities.