Résumé
Success or failure of newly established winegrowers is a key question and the bank is particularly interested in how to properly finance good wine farms “installation” projects. This paper examines the role of debt contract terms (credit availability, maturity, different type of loans, collaterals) in mitigating information assymetry, first in focusing on the debt contract terms according to general characteristics of the “installation projects”, supposed to be more or less risky, second in making some correlation tests between the debt contract terms. We use bank data collected in a unique survey of 272 vineyards acquisitions in the main French wine regions. As a result, we can propose three very distinct bankwinegrower relationship stories: the success story, when credit availability automatically reduces the collateral ratio; the bank-firm dependency story, when credit rationing occurs and short maturities give monitoring power to the bank; the failure story, when tense liquidity, over-borrowing and repayment default characterize the bank relationship.