Global Food History | 2019
Worlds in a Wine Glass: Rethinking the Global and the Local
Abstract
In the contemporary global age, grape wine has become a leading signifier of the connections, symbioses, and oppositions in the local-global dialectic around food. This is in large part because of the discursive and economic power of localist or antiglobalization interest in the “taste of place,” a term that has become encapsulated in the French-derived concept of the terroir of wines from particular vineyard locations. Because wine drinkers are often fascinated by wines from places they have never visited, terroir is distinct from the “taste of home,” a nostalgia arising from the global transmission of foods as a result of the mass migration of people in the modern era. The present wave of wine globalization opened in the 1990s, as a number of countries outside Europe began exporting large volumes of affordable, mass-produced wines to a wider consumer base, thereby crossing geographic and social boundaries that once excluded many groups from access to wine. Many consumers have embraced this trend and are unconcerned by the rise of industrial-scale wine production and the concomitant displacement of wine styles. Producers and journalists, particularly those from traditionally dominant wine regions of western Europe, responded to the competition by critiquing mass-produced wines and insisting on the value of place-specific or at least place-and-grape-specific wines. There is a direct relationship between the current globalization of grape wine production, distribution, and consumption and a rise in scholarly interest in wine. Most of the papers in this special issue were originally developed for the first International Conference on Wine Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences cohosted at Kings College London (KCL) in May 2016 by the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies at KCL and the Wine Studies Research Network at the University of Newcastle, Australia. The theme of that meeting, Worlds in a Wine Glass, aimed to broadly survey current critical approaches to wine. It attracted thirty papers by presenters from ten countries in the disciplines of History, Anthropology, Sociology, Philosophy, French Studies, Geography, Business, and Marketing. With the exception of Zachary Nowak’s article, the research published here was first presented in London. The papers overall indicate that wine history offers more than analyses of the changing nature of the product, which occupies most popular literature on wine, and represents a fruitful frame for scholarly engagement with political economy and with the politics of cultural identity and social and intellectual, as well as material, mobilities. The conditions and means of the cultural stratification of wines and wine places is an important lens on contemporary societies. For this reason, several papers in this volume are concerned with the origins, emergence, and impact of terroir as an influential tool for the hegemonic ordering of products and therefore of producers and consumers. Yet, much of the significance of wine lies not in veneration of the static nature of vineyards and winemaking traditions but in the long and diverse history of the movement of the GLOBAL FOOD HISTORY 2019, VOL. 5, NOS. 1–2, 1–4 https://doi.org/10.1080/20549547.2019.1573600