David Inglis and Anna-Mari Almila eds. 2019. The Globalization of Wine London: Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN: 978-1-4742-6499-0. pp. 232.
Yingkun Hou (South East Missouri State University)
Before entering Graduate School in the US to start my career as an anthropologist about ten years ago, I spent many years learning about wine, tasting wine, and educating people about wine. After getting my bachelor's degree in Viticulture and Enology, I worked with wineries, wine distributors, and wine consumers in China to promote wine culture and its related lifestyles. As I became an anthropologist, I started to read about wine in anthropology. However, many of these articles I found about wine scattered in journals on food or sensory studies, and many tend to analyze wine either as a cultural food product or focus on a specific topic about wine (e.g., the taste/tasting of wine (Shapin 2011; 2016). So I was pleasantly surprised to find a volume that focuses on wine and covers a wide range of topics.
Many well discussed topics regarding wine such as "terroir," "taste," and "social class" are certainly important aspects considered in this volume edited by Inglis and Almila. But many chapters also attempt to give a more complex picture with some unique combinations of concepts and approaches, which I found quite thought provoking. For example, chapter 10, "Natural Wine and the Globalization of a Taste for Provenance" (Maguire), places wine in the larger contexts of the globalizing process of cultural food products such as cheese and salt. But it also investigates how the legitimacy of "taste regimes" for natural wine developed together with the "emergent omnivorous taste for provenance and authenticity" (185).
The papers in this volume also provide discussions that traverse those boundaries. The volume's introduction sets the stage for later chapters. Inglis and Almila first give the reader a taste of how globalizing processes are deeply embedded in a series of stages from the production to the consumption of wine, as well as how various of global actors—from distributors to those who work in wine discourses—are involved. The editors also lay out some basic definitions such as "wine field," "wine world," "wine culture," that the authors in this volume all adhere to, which provides consistency for otherwise overlapping and potentially confusing concepts. A subsequent chapter by Inglis provides an overview on the long-term dynamics and contemporary patterns of wine globalization. It briefly traces the trends and continuities across time in terms of wine production and distribution from a long-term perspective. In doing so, Inglis shows us that as a cultural product that has existed for probably over eight thousand years, wine is indeed a unique subject for investigating the complex landscape of globalization and neoliberalization of our time. Inglis also includes an important discussion of the Old World/New World division, showing the invention of this division itself, like the invention of the categories of "traditional" and "modern," are a result of globalizing processes. However, as the processes continues, newly emerged wine regions (such as China) and new styles of wine (Georgia's fashionable wine) challenge this inflexible division. As Inglis notes, it is quite ironic to see its continued usage when the categories themselves no longer demarcate the significant differences as they once did.
For those interested in more classic wine regions, the volume has chapters discussing the complex imbrication of globalization and local terroir in Burgundy (Demossier) and the dynamics of Bordeaux Wines in gaining and maintaining its global reputation (Chauvin). These chapters not only give a brief overview on the importance of the regions for people who may not have much knowledge about them, they also include interviews with informants from fieldwork that are not wine professionals, which wine aficionados will not be able to find in their usual readings about wine. The cases of Burgundy and Bordeaux provide good examples of the critique of the Old World/New World contrast described by Inglis. Both Demossier and Chauvin successfully present a messy and complex picture filled with contradictions and disputes. Even regions like Burgundy and Bordeaux that can be viewed as the symbols of the tradition and legacy of the Old World are active participants in the processes of wine globalization. In fact, it is exactly this active participation in wine globalization that gained them these reputations and legitimacies.
For those who are interested in less well-known wine regions, the volume also includes chapters on North Carolina (Taplin) and Republic of Macedonia (Otten). While the US and the Republic of Macedonia are very different in regard to their socio-cultural, political and economic contexts, in both places the local wine industries have struggled to stay afloat and relevant.
While this edited volume is certainly not exhaustive on the topic of wine and globalization, it does cover a wide range of interesting and thought-provoking topics. I have some experience and knowledge of some classic topics when I was part of the wine field/world/culture (based on the definition of this volume), such as Burgundy and Bordeaux wine mentioned above. But the chapters urged me to think differently about what I know of them. The chapter in this volume that resonated the most for me was the last chapter by Almila, "Wine, Women and Globalization." As I had studied wine and worked in the wine field/world/culture for many years, I certainly felt many of the issues around gender that Almila raises in this chapter. I have been to a wine tasting competition in Europe as one of the only females and in my early 20s. I felt my evaluations of wine were more readily dismissed. I also have pointed out a corked wine in a restaurant in the US and received very harsh response from the male sommelier. But until I read this chapter, I didn't place my experience in the larger contexts of gender disparities in the wine field/world/culture. While I have encountered people who would compare wine to women in China, Europe, and the U.S., I have seen little scholarly discussion on the "long and often vexed history of women and wine" (208) as Almila presents in this chapter.
Just as Almila points out, wine globalization played a critical role for women like me to come to know wine. While there are still many persisting issues for women in the wine world, field, and culture, the globalizing process continues to change and shape this reality. The future of wine world, field, and culture, as many of the chapters in this volume have shed light on, is constantly evolving.
Editor's Note: As this review was going to press we discovered that another version of the book is available with several additional chapters. We hope to update this review to include the additional materials later this year. The different version Table of Contents can be found here
References:
Shapin, Steven
2011 Changing Tastes: How Foods Tasted in the Early Modern Period and How They Taste Now: The Hans Rausing Lecture, 2011.
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2016 A taste of science: Making the subjective objective in the California wine world. Soc Stud Sci 46(3):436-460.
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