Wine and Culture - by Rachel E Black & Robert C Ulin (Paperback)

About the Book

This path-breaking collection by leading scholars explores the cultural, social and historical issues which inform the production and consumption of wine.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

Given its global, economic, social and cultural importance, it's astonishing that the anthropology of wine has been so neglected for so long. This splendid collection of incisive essays goes a long way towards establishing key issues in this emerging field, many of which are also relevant to contemporary anthropology in general.
Jeremy MacClancy, Professor of Social Anthropoology, Dept of Social Sciences, Oxford Brookes University, uk

This collection is a heady investigation of wine as a sociocultural and historical commodity in diverse global sites. Fifteen engaging articles show how the ethnographic study of wine penetrates beyond the bottle to reveal labor relations, power structures, market forces, and deeply held meanings about identity and place.
Carole Counihan, author of 'Around the Tuscan Table: Food, Family and Gender in Twentieth Century Florence' and editor-in-chief of 'Food and Foodways'

This collection represents the first of its kind to focus on wine from a sociocultural perspective while bringing together current approaches to questions of identity, culture, authenticity, craft and technology, and the senses. Like terroir itself, this collection roots the taste of wine in places, in the history and emergence of new landscapes of tastes, and the changing social and environmental relations of its production, dissemination and consumption. Uncork it for yourself and see!
David Sutton, Professor of Anthropology, Southern Illinois University, USA

About the Author

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.