ABSTRACT
This chapter will attempt to make connections between worlds of production and worlds of consumption. More specifically the chapter will introduce the concept of palate geographies and argue that the concept provides a useful lens through which to refract our understandings of food/wine networks at the global scale and their economic and cultural underpinnings. At the general level, I argue that palate geographies reflect how food and wine networks are intimately linked to the changing tastes of consumers and how key global actors (such as supermarket buyers) interact with shifts in consumer taste in the markets in which they operate. Meanwhile, at the production end of these global networks, palate geographies reflect the need for wine producers to make efforts to change their production mixes and ‘create’ new tastes given their perception of the changing palates of consumers in distant and often culturally very different consuming spaces.
