Project: Research on Cassis as a wine and a wine region in the past, present, and future. This field and archival study has sought to understand how the wine from this one small commune on the Mediterranean coast evolved through time, reflects the notion of terroir, and represents a particular commercial structure. Although wine was probably produced in the commune in Greco-Roman Antiquity, its character today is a product of the twentieth century. The transcendental event was its designation in 1936 as an appellation contrôlée (AOC) which set down specific legal requirements about territorial definition, acceptable grape varieties, and maximum allowed production. Appellation contrôlée in Cassis in the year 2000 has fourteen producers, all of whose grapes come from inside the commune, but one of whose wineries is outside the commune. An extraordinary 70% of its production is purchased by the restaurant business; only about 5% is exported. The future of the Cassis wine region is enhanced by the land-use protection afforded by the special legal status for AOC territories approved in 1990 and by the master plan (Plan d'occupation du sol) for the commune revised in 1999. Viniculture in Cassis is now perceived as enhancing the aesthetics of landscape and for its role in mitigating the periodic floods and forest fires. However, the unusual attractiveness of Cassis and the relentless suburbanization of Greater Marseilles create intense land-use pressures that cloud the long-term future of Cassis viniculture. This study also raises larger questions about wine in France: the generalized shift in controlled appellations toward greater specificity of type (in Cassis, this is reflected in increasing emphasis on just white wine and on the Marsanne variety of grape); the characteristic use of micro-environmental factors that define terroir as the indispensable explanation for wine quality; the implications for the relative lack of innovation within an appellation due to the rigidity of AOC rules; the intense territorialization that appellation contrôlée represents and how that is manifested; and the meaning of the florid and uncritical discourse of wine meant to promote sales rather than to provide realistic quality evaluations.