ABSTRACT
This is a new contribution written specially for the present volume. It invites readers to consider rejecting dominant discourses about beverages – particularly wine but also spirits, coffees and teas – in favour of an alternative understanding of the ‘language’ of beverages as a routine means of objectively meaningless market/brand differentiation and segmentation inevitable in capitalist society. Far from constituting an area of great technical expertise, ‘wine studies and appreciation’ is a manufactured form of pseudo-expertise which depends on language to create economic and social exclusion, naturally conferring the aura of refinement on those who are doing the excluding. Increasingly, such pretensions have been, and are even now being, carried over to other areas of beverage consumption – for example tea, coffee, spirits and beer.
