Mutating and Contested Languages of Wine: Heard on the Grapevine

Orchestrating Multi‐sensoriality in Tasting Sessions: Sensing Bodies, Normativity, and Language

“…These resources for enhancing sensations work like predecessors (Goodwin 2017; Schutz 1962) that are reanimated through practices of reading; the terminology sheet and the tasting grids are tools that connect the present situated sensing practices with the tradition and history of the tasting procedures. The historical, cultural, and institutional dimensions of tasting have been discussed in the literature (Classen 1993; Inglis 2019; Shapin 2011; Vannini, Waskul, and Gottschalk 2012) on the basis of archival and ethnographic studies. A detailed video‐based multi‐modal analysis of multi‐sensoriality in interaction shows how these historical, cultural, and institutional dimensions are indeed embedded in situated actions, being locally accomplished in and through simple and yet subtly coordinated sets of manual, intellectual, and sensorial practices.…”

“…Like wine, cheese is a product that involves not only complex sensorial features (Mondada 2018a(Mondada , 2019a but also a complex array of normative, cultural, and historical values (Grasseni 2017). Unlike wine, on which there is a vast literature concerning the development of a normative language for describing it (Inglis 2019;Shapin 2011), cheese has not yet been treated as an object for tasting sessions and expression. The tasting session studied here is embedded in a course organized by a major national association for cheese tasting, responsible for establishing professional norms, vocabulary, and practices.…”

Can a wine be feminine? Gendered wine descriptors and quality, price, and aging potential

“…Previous research has shown that male and female judges assign the same scores to the same wines (Bodington, 2017;Bodington and Malfeito-Ferreira, 2018), but the relationship between wine quality and its gendered description is uncertain. Some authors have argued that gendered wine descriptors are used to transfer societal gender distinctions to the wine sector, with lighter "feminine" wines rated as inferior and less interesting than larger "masculine" wines (Matasar, 2006;Inglis, 2020). Pogacar et al (2021) assert that feminine names are positively associated with warmth and could provide a branding advantage and increased choice.…”

A Wine Flight of Gendered Sociology: Vignettes of (Apparent) Trivialities

“…Douglas (1987: 9) enters into a relevant vignette-type reflection right in middle of her introduction to Constructive Drinking, where she comments upon the remarkable wine-tasting abilities of the fictional gentleman detective Lord Peter Wimsey (created in the early 1920s by Dorothy L. Sayers), whose many and varied skills involve the capability of flawlessly blind-naming port vintages, indicating both his high social status and his extreme competence in exclusive class performance. Wine language and talk are not only gendered in multiple ways (Inglis, 2019), they are also deeply classed. 7 Symbolic boundaries can be drawn through symbolic dominance expressed and exercised through expertise in wine language.…”