This article examines, in the French Competitiveness Cluster policy context, the aborted attempt to create a wine cluster in Bordeaux. The failure is here analyzed as an inhibitor versus a trigger of learning. Very few studies deal with this topic in the industrial clusters field, in which the stress is largely put on success, in theory as well as in practice. Going beyond the binary view of failure, we propose a third way, a dynamic created despite failure, without any questioning of the project’s outline. This enables us to underline the conditions in which such a learning process can occur.