Wine and Culture Vineyard to Glass

Wine is one of the most celebrated and appreciated commodities around the world. Wine writers and scientists tell us much about varieties of wines, winegrowing estates, the commercial value and the biochemistry of wine, but seldom address the cultural, social, and historical conditions through which wine is produced and represented. This path-breaking collection of essays by leading anthropologists looks not only at the product but also beyond this to disclose important social and cultural issues that inform the production and consumption of wine. The authors show that wine offers a window onto a variety of cultural, social, political and economic issues throughout the world. The global scope of these essays demonstrates the ways in which wine changes as an object of study, commodity and symbol in different geographical and cultural contexts. This book is unique in covering the latest ethnography, theoretical and ethnohistorical research on wine throughout the globe. Four central themes emerge in this collection: terroir; power and place; commodification and politics; and technology and nature. The essays in each section offer broad frameworks for looking at current research with wine at the core.

Rachel E. Black is assistant professor and coordinator of the Gastronomy Program at Boston University, USA. She edited Alcohol in Popular Culture: An Encyclopedia (Greenwood, 2011) and has a forthcoming monograph Porta Palazzo: Food, Place and Community at the market (University of Pennsylvania Press) that is an ethnographic study of an open-air market in Italy.

Robert C. Ulin is Professor of Anthropology at Rochester Institute of Technology, USA where he also served for two years as Dean of the College of Liberal Arts. Prior to coming to RIT, Ulin served as Chair of Anthropology at Western Michigan University. He is the author of Vintages and Traditions and numerous articles on the anthropology of wine. He is also well known for his work on hermeneutics, critical theory and historical anthropology.

Introduction - Rachel Black (Boston University, USA) and Robert Ulin (Rochester Institute of Technology, USA)Section One - Rethinking TerroirSection Introduction - Robert Ulin (Rochester Institute of Technology, USA)The Social Life of Terroir among Bordeaux Winemakers - Sarah Daynes (University of North Carolina Greensboro, USA)Rethinking Terroir in Australia - Robert Swinburn (University of Melbourne, Australia)Space and Terroir in the Chilean Wine Industry - Nicolas Sternsdorff (Harvard University, USA)Terroir and Locality: An Anthropological Perspective - Robert Ulin (Rochester Institute of Technology, USA)Section Two - Relationships of Power and the Construction of PlaceSection Introduction - Rachel Black (Boston University, USA)Tasting Wine in Slovakia: Post-socialist Elite Cultural Particularities - Juraj Buzalka (Comenius University, Bratislava)Wine Histories, Wine Memories and Local Identities in Western Poland - Ewa Kopczynska (Jagiellonian University, Poland)El Sabor de Galicia: Wine as Performance in Galicia, Spain - Christina Ceisel (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA)Local, Loyal and Constant: The Legal Construction of Wine in Bordeaux - Erica Farmer (University College London, UK)Traces of the Past: Cultural Patrimony and the Bureaucratization of Wine - Yuson Jung (Wayne State University, USA)Section Three - Labor, Commodification and the Politics of WineSection Introduction - Robert Ulin (Rochester Institute of Technology, USA)Following Grands Crus: Global Markets, Transnational Histories and Wine - Marion Demossier (University of Southampton, UK)Georgian Wine: The Transformation of Socialist Quantity into Post-socialist Quality - Adam Walker (City University of New York Graduate School, USA) and Paul Manning (Trent University)Regimes of Regulation, Gender and Divisions of Labor in Languedoc Viticulture - Winnie Lem (Trent University, Canada)Section Four - Technology and NatureSection Introduction - Rachel Black, (Boston University, USA)Pursuits of Quality in the Vineyards: French Oenologists at Work in Lebanon - Elizabeth Saleh (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK)The Artifice of Natural Wine: Jules Chauvet and the Reinvention of Vinification in Postwar France - Paul Cohen (University of Toronto, Canada)Vino Naturale: Tensions Between Nature and Technology in the Glass - Rachel Black (Boston University, USA)Contributor BiographiesBibliography