The Routledge Handbook of Wine and Culture

Steve Charters, Marion Demossier, Jacqueline Dutton, Graham Harding, Jennifer Smith Maguire, Denton Marks, Tim Unwin, Steve Charters, Marion Demossier, Jacqueline Dutton, Graham Harding, Jennifer Smith Maguire, Denton Marks, Tim Unwin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781032578286
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000533958
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Hostelería, viajes y turismo

This title was a prize winner at the OIV (International Organisation of Vine and Wine) Awards 2023.

The link between culture and wine reaches back into the earliest history of humanity. The Routledge Handbook of Wine and Culture brings together a newly comprehensive, interdisciplinary overview of contemporary research and thinking on how wine fits into the cultural frameworks of production, intermediation and consumption.

Bringing together many leading researchers engaged in studying these phenomena, it explores the different ways in which wine is constructed as a social artefact and how its representation and use acquire symbolic meaning. Wine can be analysed in different ways by varying disciplines involved in exploring wine and culture (anthropology, economics and business, geography, history and sociology, and as text). The Handbook uses these as lenses to consider how producers, intermediaries and consumers use and create cultural significance. Specifically, the work addresses the following: how wine relates to place, belief systems and accompanying rituals; how it may be used as a marker of the identity and mechanisms of civilising processes (often in conjunction with food and the arts); how its framing intersects with science and nature; the ideologies and power relations which arise around all these activities; and the relation of this to wine markets and public institutions.

This is essential reading for researchers and students in education for the wine industry and in the humanities and social sciences engaged in understanding patterns of human ingenuity and interaction, such as sociology, anthropology, economics, health, geography, business, tourism, cultural studies, food studies and history.

Part IContext: disciplinary perspectives on wine and culture

1 Anthropology, wine and culture

Marion Demossier and Clelia Viecelli

DOI: 10.4324/9781003034711-3

Introduction

Anthropology has traditionally been associated with the concept of culture, producing detailed, empirical ethnographies of the places and people studied, often over long periods of time. Most analyses have privileged the study of human diversity through people’s key values, social practices and understandings of their place in the world. Comparison and cultural relativism are fundamental to the discipline (Candea 2019). Ethnography, described as a ‘potentially revolutionary praxis’ (Shah 2017: 45), still characterises the uniqueness of the anthropological approach compared to other disciplines through its long-term participant observation, reflexivity, critical positionality and immersion by being in location. The history of the concept of culture includes the idealised norms and values that we hold in our minds and the symbolic nature of culture, which is understood and interpreted by individuals and groups. Political and economic forces, social institutions, and biological processes take their place in any complete explanation of why people think and behave as they do, against an explanation based on cultural determinism (Kuper 2000). The study of wine culture has benefited from this broader intellectual endeavour, bringing people back and engaging critically with what they say and what they do.

Core disciplinary concepts and scholars relevant to the anthropological study of wine and culture

Anthropology, like other human and social sciences, has long demonstrated an interest in the study of drinking and alcohol (Wilson 2005), but wine was often studied alongside other beverages such as tea, coffee, rum and brandy and was never given top billing. If, in the English-speaking world, it is easy to trace back the genealogy of the anthropological contribution to wine culture, it requires multilingual skills to navigate the field when exploring European anthropologies.¹ If the work by the British structuralist anthropologist Mary Douglas, Constructive Drinking (first edition 1987), opened the door to an anthropology of alcohol and de facto wine, it, nevertheless, treated wine like other types of fermented substances without making it a particular commodity. However, Douglas’s contribution set out a new agenda whereby drinking was defined as an essential social act performed in a recognised social context, with the potential to construct the world both as it is and as an idealised commodity through rituals (Fabre-Vassas 1989). This dichotomy between ideal and real indeed remains key to most of the anthropological literature on wine (Howland and Dutton 2019).

Nearly a decade later, two landmark publications established more firmly the anthropological study of wine, despite ‘the disease prevention stance and the shadow of intoxication’ (Black and Ulin 2013: 6) accompanying it. Both had France as their main object of study, illustrating the disciplinary shifts which saw the closure of traditional areas of fieldwork following decolonisation and the rising opportunities offered by new European funding. In this context, American anthropologists started to turn their attention to rural communities, and France offered an original site for the study of rural Europe (Rogers 1987, 2002). The publication in 1996 of Vintages and Traditions: An Ethnography of Southwest French Wine Cooperatives by the American anthropologist Robert C. Ulin (1996) provided the first original contribution to the ethnographic study of wine and culture. The novelty of the book is to question the French idea of terroir as a naturalised and mythicised construct under capitalism. The cooperatives provide de facto a striking example of the ambiguities attached to labour in capitalist societies and offer a unique example of collective resistance in neo-liberal times. In her work on the Languedoc, Winnie Lem (1999) examined wine production and capitalism through the gender lens and discussed their impact on traditional rural communities. Focusing on gender relations and the reproduction of the family farms, Lem aptly questioned how local cultures are produced and changed while paying attention to cultural discourses about collective identity and agency.

Yet it was only in 2013² that wine acquired its own legitimate status in anthropology with the publication of Wine and Culture: Vineyard to Glass, edited by Rachel E. Black and Robert C. Ulin. For both anthropologists, the study of wine breaks new ground, but it is also linked to critical issues at the forefront of the social sciences and humanities, especially debates on neo-liberalism and capitalism (Crenn 2015). The object of their scrutiny has followed the intricacies of capitalism and provides a productive window for the study of social change. Their volume can be seen as the first deliberate attempt to give wine a legitimate academic status, separate from the boom witnessed in the last two decades in food studies (Black and Ulin: Introduction). It also provides a new direction to the field by shifting the geographic focus outside France to include Bulgaria, Galicia, Lebanon, Italy and Slovakia, as well as moving the focus away from Old European wine-producing regions. These ethnographies contribute to a critical perspective over locality, communities and globalisation and argue for complexities (Ong and Collier 2003).

Key themes and questions relating to wine within the discipline

The main contribution of anthropology to the study of wine has been to engage critically with the mythologisation attached to the commodity and to its corollary expression, terroir. Anthropologists have increasingly focused on terroir as a social construct, ‘how terroir has been used and represented historically, socially, culturally and politically to support the reputedly unique characteristics of particular wines in particular places’ (Black and Ulin 2013: 12). In these ethnographies, stories deployed as narratives, maps or discourses historically produced by wine producers, wine organisations or wine intermediaries have played a major role in wine culture, often legitimising the politics of value (meaning here how wines are ranked and valued) and the complex systems of wine classifications but obscuring the social processes at stake. The processes of engagement with terroir underline how individual and collective agencies are central to a sense of identification and the production of sociality and social representations (Demossier 2011).

Several anthropologists, in the footsteps of Ulin, have examined how these imaginaries contribute to the construction of place or quality or how they have become, with time, contested or transformed by social and economic change. Interestingly, it is against rapid and differentiated globalisation that wine has become the centre of new anthropological research concerns (Black and Ulin 2013; Demossier 2018). If France has remained a point of reference in the terroir discussion, an increasing number of anthropologists have shifted their attention to other geographic areas following the deployment of the concept of terroir in other locations, which has become customised, interpreted, translated and appropriated according to local conditions of reception (Appadurai 1995: 16). The New World, for example, has been explored by William Skinner (2015, 2018, 2019) in his study of McLaren Vale in South Australia. Bringing a more philosophical gaze, Robert Swinburn (2018) has concentrated his attention on how terroir, as an idea taken up by winegrowers in Geelong (Australia), could be better conceptualised as a sensibility – the poetry, rather than science or economics. More recently, China has become the place of original ethnographic research (Galipeau 2017; Zheng 2019). The anthropologist and filmmaker Boris Petric has even visually documented the relationship between the Chinese and the French when it comes to wine and, more generally, the challenge of conveying a relationship to nature and to time beyond cultural differences in his film Château Pékin (2018).

Another fundamental contribution lies with the politics of scale around wine production and consumption (micro and macro), in which anthropologists have shifted the terms of the debate, especially when moving the debate to new horizons beyond France. Wine culture as an object of study in European anthropology was traditionally confined to the nation and formed part of a wider European cultural imperialistic project (Black and Ulin 2013: 2). The growing importance of wine as a cultural product is beyond doubt, and its study, as an object sensitive to the socio-political structures in which it is made and consumed, deepens our understanding of the contemporary world. Territorialisation was thus a key ingredient of this long historical process, and wine communities featured pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Culture and wine: an introduction
• Part I Context: disciplinary perspectives on wine and culture
• Part II Production and place
• Part III Intermediation and consumption
• Part IV Belief and representation
• Part V Power and contestation
• Part VI Change and the future