ABSTRACT
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 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 of 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, health, geography, business, tourism, cultural studies, food studies and history.
Introduction. Part I- Context: Disciplinary Perspectives On Wine And Culture. 1Anthropology, Wine and Culture. 2.Business, Wine and Culture. 3.Economics, Wine and Culture. 4.Geography, Wine and Culture. 5.History, Wine and Culture. 6.Sociology, Wine and Culture. 7.Text, Wine and Culture. Part II- Production and Place. 8.Cultures of Terroir. 9.Sites and Sights of Production: Spaces and Performances of Winemaking. 10.Wine Islands: Colonial Cultures of the Vine. 11.Expressing Sense of Place and Terroir through Wine to Tourism Encounters: Antipodal Reflections from France to New Zealand. 12.Wine, Culture and Environment: A Study of the Sierra (Nevada) Foothills American Viticultural Area. 13.Making Wine, Making Home. 14.Climats and the Crafting of Heritage Value in Burgundy Terroir. 15.Wine, Deep in the Heart of Texas. Part III- Intermediation and Consumption. 16.Characters of Wine: The Cultural Meanings of Typefaces and Fonts in Wine Labels. 17.Making the Right Impression: Irish Wine Culture c.1700 to Present. 18.Wine as part of Polish Identity in Early Modern Times. Constructing Wine Culture in Non-Wine Countries. 19.The Shape of Luxury: Three Centuries of the Champagne Glass in British Material Culture. 20.‘For Us as Experimentalists’: An Australian Case Study of Scientific Values in the 19th Century New World Winegrowing. 21.Tasting as Expertise: Scientific Agronomists and Sommeliers in France in the First Half of the Twentieth Century. 22.Wine Writing as Lifestyle Writing: Communicating Taste and Constructing Lifestyle in the Saturday Times Wine Column. 23.The (Practical) Economics of Selling Wine as a Cultural Good. 24.Champagne: A Global Symbol of Contemporary Consumer Culture. Part IV: Belief and Representation. 25.Wine and Religion Part I: Antiquity to 1700. 26.Wine and Religion Part II: 1700 to the Present. 27.Wine as Metaphor. 28.New world wine and the evolution of universal, vernacular, metro-rural, and indigenous idylls. 29.Narratives of Science and Culture in Winemaking. 30.Applying Fashion Theory to Wine: A Production of Culture Example. 31.Spending, Taste and Knowledge: Logics of Connoisseurship and Good Taste in the Age of Cultural Democratisation. Part V: Power and Contestation. 32.Competing and Complementary Utopias: Toward an Understanding of Entangled Wine Ideals. 33.Threats of Pleasure and Chaos: Wine and Gendered Social Order. 34.Women in Wine…Occasionally: Gender Roles in the Wine Industry. 35.Sustainable Wine: The Discursive Production of Sustainability in the Wine Field. 36.The Triumph of the Holy Trinity: Terrior, Typicity, and Quality Anchoring the AOC Model in the Second Half of the 20th Century. 37.What can Winemakers’ business models tell us about the cultural traits of wine regions? A Comparative analysis. 38.Repudiation Not Withstanding: Critics and the Case for Hybrid Grape Wines. 39.If It’s Famous, It Must Be Good: The Social Construction of Brand Value in the US Wine Market. Part VI: Change and the Future. 40.The Internationalization of Winegrape Varieties and its Implication for Terroir-Based Cultural Assets. 41.Cultural Heritage and Migration in the Wine World. 42.The China Wine Market: How Wine is Gaining Cultural Value in Chinese Culture. 43.Beyond White: On Wine and Ethnicity. 44.Climate or Technical Change in Wine? Confronting Climatologists’ and Wine-Growers’ Analyses. 45.Winegrowing, Climate Change, and a Case for Biodynamic Viticulture. Conclusion
