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This article illustrates the changes in the definition of the quality of wines in France from the sixteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth century, considering taste as a social construction influenced by different factors (cultural, social, economic). In the sixteenth century, the definition of a good wine was based largely on medical criteria inherited from Antiquity, connected to the theory of the humors. Wine was considered to form part of a healthy lifestyle, depending on its characteristics: color, age, consistency, taste, origin. . . Every individual having different needs, this qualitative frame did not generate a very clear hierarchy between wines. From the middle of the seventeenth century, the criterion of taste was emphasized, removed from the medical elements. A good wine had to have a fine taste, a delicate color, secondary aromas (flowers, fruits), which the distinguished man had to recognize and assess. Certain wines were considered to possess these qualities, and their consumption became socially compulsory: Champagne, Burgundy, then Bordeaux. A strict hierarchy based on taste appeared during the eighteenth century between vineyards, and also between “crus.” This hierarchy gave rise to a closed classification, the classes of which corresponded to social categories. The quality became measurable and transparent. In 1816, André Jullien established a classification of French wines from a mechanical approach based on a taste considered as objective and absolute.