From Chateau Latour to Chateau Bourdieu: The sociology of wine between empire, class, ethnicity and gender (or, the oenologic of practice)

Abstract

Many sociologists drink wine, but hardly any write about it professionally, and the putative scholarly field of the ‘sociology of wine’ remains inchoate, the study of wine mostly being ceded to other disciplines. This is strange, as wine is crucial to a host of phenomena, such as national and regional identities in winemaking countries, as well as identity construction and class-based distinction dynamics in many other locations. Wine has received relatively little attention from Bourdieu or those inspired by him. Indeed, some of the most influential writings on wine in a sociological register today are sometimes explicitly hostile to his sociology. Yet for all types of activities traversing the overlapping domains of the production, social distribution and consumption of wine, Bourdieusian elements must be brought into the analysis to be able to appreciate interlocking issues of class, ethnicity and gender relations and inequalities, particularly within imperial/colonial and post-imperial/post-colonial social contexts. In its 8000-year history, very major factors in the social structuring of wine have been imperial power and colonial expansion, factors bound up with ethnic and gender inequalities in wine phenomena both historically and today. A flexible and open-minded version of Bourdieu, as advocated by Bridget Fowler, draws attention to ongoing dynamics of power and resistance in wine worlds.