ABSTRACT
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.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|46 pages
Context: disciplinary perspectives on wine and culture
part II|74 pages
Production and place
chapter 11|9 pages
Expressing sense of place and terroir through wine tourism encounters
chapter 12|11 pages
Wine, culture and environment
part III|98 pages
Intermediation and consumption
chapter 18|10 pages
Wine as part of Polish identity in early modern times
chapter 19|11 pages
The shape of luxury
chapter 20|11 pages
‘For us as experimentalists’
chapter 21|9 pages
Tasting as expertise
chapter 22|8 pages
Wine writing as lifestyle writing
part IV|66 pages
Belief and representation
chapter 31|9 pages
Spending, taste and knowledge
part V|85 pages
Power and contestation
chapter 32|12 pages
Competing and complementary utopias
chapter 36|11 pages
The triumph of the holy trinity
chapter 39|10 pages
If it's famous, it must be good
part VI|71 pages
Change and the future