The Routledge Handbook of Wine and Culture

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.

Steve Charters is Professor of Wine Marketing and a researcher at Burgundy School of Business in Dijon, and is responsible for developing teaching and research programmes focusing on all aspects of the business, culture and history of wine. He is also adjunct professor in the Adelaide Business School at the University of Adelaide, Australia.

Marion Demossier is Professor of Social Anthropology in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at the University of Southampton. She has recently completed a monograph on the anthropology of wine and terroir: Burgundy, a Global Anthropology of Place and Taste.

Jacqueline Dutton is Professor of French Studies at the University of Melbourne. She co-edited Wine, Terroir and Utopia: Making New Worlds (with Peter J. Howland) and her research focuses on the cultural history of wine in Bordeaux, Burgundy, and Champagne.

Graham Harding is a wine historian attached to the history faculty of the University of Oxford. His Champagne in Britain, 1800–1914: How the English Transformed a French Luxury was published in 2021.

Jennifer Smith Maguire is Professor of Cultural Production and Consumption at the Sheffield Business School, Sheffield Hallam University. Her expertise lies in the socio-cultural study of consumer culture and cultural intermediaries, with a special focus on the construction of markets, tastes and value.

Denton Marks

is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and fellow of the American Association of Wine Economists. His research involves a range of aspects of wine as a cultural good, and his Wine and Economics: Transacting the Elixir of Life is used internationally in various oenological programs.

Tim Unwin is Emeritus Professor of Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. He co-founded the Journal of Wine Research in 1990 and was external examiner and academic advisor to the Institute of Masters of Wine from 2004 to 2011.