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.

Keywords

Pierre Bourdieu class empire ethnicity gender intersectionality wine consumption wine production

Introduction

To what extent can wine made from grapes, which can reach sublime heights of deliciousness, mix with sociology, often known for its acrid flavours and bitter aftertastes?

In the German region of Pfalz, Chateau Weber makes decent Riesling, Pinot Gris and Pinot Noir wines. Also in Pfalz, the wine festival of Bad Durkheim claims to be the largest of its kind globally. Émile Durkheim spent formative years in Bordeaux, one of the world’s premium wine regions. Karl Marx grew up in the winemaking valley of the Mosel. His early journalism included a report about the plight of vineyard workers there (Baumeister, 2018).

Bruno Latour came from a prominent winemaking family in the prestigious Burgundy region, and one of his catchwords, ‘assemblage’, drawn from Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, is also an oenological term, referring to the mixing of different base wines to achieve a harmonious blend. Conversely, in the small and not particularly prestigious region within Bordeaux called Blaye, is Chateau Bourdieu. This winery has, we believe, no familial connections to the eponymous sociologist, but the relative lack of recognition and prestige of its offerings certainly echoes the humble social origins of Bourdieu (2008) himself.

Many sociologists drink wine, but hardly any write about it, at least for professional purposes. The putative scholarly field of the ‘sociology of wine’ remains inchoate (Inglis & Almila, 2019, 2022). This is odd. Wine is a multi-million dollar global(ised) industry, employing hundreds of thousands of people directly, and millions more indirectly in the hospitality sector. It has been crucial to national and regional identities in winemaking countries. It is a resource for old-school upper-class and newer middle-class aspirational drinkers alike. At the upper end of the wine scale, prestige wines are deployed by elites for the purposes of cultural legitimacy, conspicuous consumption and prodigious investments, leading to spiralling prices for elite and cult wines (Inglis & Almila, 2019, 2022).

Meanwhile, the needs of hip drinkers for ever more specific and obscure beverages are met by a new wave of younger, hipster winemakers. Consumers of wine are growing in numbers, social heterogeneity and geographical diversity. New winemaking territories are being developed in both cooler climate and hotter climate countries as diverse as Belgium and Thailand. Finland may make reasonable white wine soon, as Sweden already does. As climate change makes the winemaking process more unpredictable, 150 years of human techno-scientific control of vines and wines is brought into question. As some places and people lose out as environmental conditions change, so too do new winners emerge in the globalised wine field (see Inglis, 2022b; Inglis & Almila, 2019, 2022).

Yet despite all such factors being ripe for sociological analysis, sociological studies of wine are few, even in historically wine-producing countries, and wine matters remain ceded to other disciplines, notably geography (Unwin, 1991), economics (Castriota, 2020), anthropology (Black & Ulin, 2013), marketing (Beverland & Luxton, 2005) and history (Simpson, 2011).

This article will sketch out a Bourdieu-influenced framework for studying wine sociologically. It will focus on how one might conceptualise the ways wine is thoroughly and inexorably bound up with power relations, of the sorts Bourdieu was most familiar with. We take inspiration from Bridget Fowler’s (2000, 2003, 2020) critical and open-minded defence and elaboration of key Bourdieusian forms of analysis. For all types of activities traversing the overlapping domains of the production, distribution and consumption of wine, Bourdieusian themes and categories must be brought into the analysis. We do not want to take the obvious path of characterising everything wine-related in terms of the conceptual trinity of class-based habitus, capital and field. But a Bourdieusian eye on wine matters can appreciate the interlocking - indeed intersectional - issues of class, ethnicity and gender relations and inequalities, particularly within the contexts of imperial/colonial and post-imperial/post-colonial social contexts. It is the Bourdieu of Masculine Domination (Bourdieu, 2001) and of the studies of late colonial period Algeria (Bourdieu, 1979; Puwar, 2009) that we particularly take inspiration from here, again elements championed by Fowler (2003, 2020).

In all its 8000-year history, probably the most major factors in the structuring of wine phenomena are imperial power and colonial expansion (Inglis, 2021, 2022a, 2022b, 2023). Unequal relations between ethnic groups, especially between colonisers and colonised – and then subsequently their ancestors in post-colonial contexts – have strongly shaped wine (Inglis, 2022b). Throughout wine’s history, access to and appreciation of the drink has been very gendered, with men holding much of the power to dictate who gets to drink which kinds of wine, which types are legitimate and illegitimate, and so on, while women have up until very recently occupied mostly subordinate positions within winemaking and wine-drinking contexts. Patriarchal structures, practices and discourses – theorised by Bourdieu (2001) as ‘masculine domination’ (Fowler, 2003) – have throughout history underpinned specific sorts of wine-related institutions. These have tended to subordinate women and exclude ethnic minorities. Such trends often involve magical thinking, fetishism and misrecognition. Only in the last few decades have the hitherto marginalised and excluded banded together to create counter-dominant wine institutions (Almila & Inglis, 2022, 2023), encompassing forms of resistance and countervailing politics that Bourdieusian conceptualisations can help us to understand (Fowler, 2020).

Bourdieu and wine

One might think that both the original sociology of Bourdieu and subsequent Bourdieu-influenced sociology would be an obvious fit with wine matters. Wine is obviously bound up with issues of class, distinction and snobbery. Relations of ownership of vineyards and wineries are very much characterised by power disparities and socio-economic inequalities (Overton & Murray, 2013). Wine worlds and fields are strongly structured by multiple overlapping forms of conflict between groups, politicised controversies and power-laden forms of language and disputes about language (Veseth, 2012).

Yet Bourdieu himself devoted little attention to wine matters, despite living in, being shaped by and studying the French national context where wine is a very potent symbol of nation and region, and was, at least up until recently, part of the quotidian fabric of life across the social classes (Demossier, 2010). Wine hardly gets the attention it deserves in La Distinction (1979/1992), despite it being an obvious object for comprehension of habitus and embodied taste.

Colonial Algeria was a huge producer of wine for the domestic French market (an issue returned to below). The centrality of vineyards to the colonial transformation of Algerian agriculture meant that the younger Bourdieu (1979), who was interested in understanding the social struggles and immiseration of the Muslim peasantry and rural proletariat, could hardly fail to deal with the wine industry there.¹ Yet his attention was not really on wine per se, and more on the vastly unequal nature of agricultural property relations (Haddour, 2009). But as another major French intellectual, Roland Barthes (1957/2013, p. 60), noted, ‘wine cannot be an unalloyedly blissful substance, except if we wrongfully forget that it is also the product of an expropriation’. This is the case for both subject peoples and their lands in Algeria, in ‘New World’ colonial and post-colonial contexts, and for small-scale vineyard owners and agricultural workers in France and other ‘Old World’ countries.

Studies of wine phenomena that explicitly draw upon Bourdieu’s concepts in positive ways exist but are relatively scarce (e.g. Beckert et al., 2017; Olivesi, 2018; Smith Maguire, 2018, 2019). More common are critiques that allege Bourdieusian sociology is far from being a good way of explicating such matters (Ho, 2021), supposedly because it perforce must reduce wine to being a symbol and index of something else, and thereby cannot be understood ‘in its own right’ (whatever that may be) (Furrow, 2020).

Some of the most influential writings on wine in a sociological register today are Bourdieu-sceptical or sometimes explicitly against his alleged social determinism. These arguments are made about wine tasting practices by the French sociologists Antoine Hennion (2007, 2015) and Geneviève Teil (2021; also Hennion & Teil, 2004). The upside of their pragmatist and Actor Network Theory-inspired studies of how French wine lovers taste wines in small groups is their attention to detail, and their focus on the forms of self-awareness that are involved as tasters open themselves up to the charms of the wines, by actively putting themselves into a sensory mode of quasi-passively allowing a wine to ‘speak for itself’.

The downside is that in their analyses of (seemingly) upper bourgeois persons (seemingly) possessed of very high levels of wine-related savoir faire and other forms of capital, issues of habitus, class privilege and distinction are expressly omitted, as are considerations of the gendered dynamics in how men and women (and gender and sexual minorities) might engage differently in wine tasting practices, as might different ethnic groups. These sorts of issues seem too tainted with the imprimatur of the theoretical antagonist, Bourdieu, to be allowed to have purchase in the analysis. Yet without consideration of such social power-related phenomena as the Bourdieusian conceptual apparatus is concerned with, any analysis will remain incomplete, circumventing modes of power and privilege that really do underpin and are expressed through tasting practices (Schwartz, 2013). It is possible to attend to the particularities of practice simultaneously with bringing into the analysis the power-laden nature of what is going on in wine tasting activities (De Benedittis, 2019).

While over the last few decades in many countries, wine has become less of an elite pursuit than it has been historically (Howland, 2013), for every ‘democratising’ trend that takes wine to social groups previously not engaged with it much, there are countervailing tendencies for elites of various sorts to draw new symbolic boundaries around what they take to be legitimate and illegitimate forms of wine and the practices associated with them (Smith Maguire, 2018). These societal dialectics of wine can be well appreciated by Bourdieu-inspired analysis.

Wine, empires and elites

The first domestication of grapevines was in the Caucasus region 8000 years ago (Kassam & Davis, 2017). Viticulture and viniculture spread along trade routes through much of central and western Eurasia, and Northern Africa (McGovern, 2003). Over time, wine became an ever more ubiquitous feature of ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean civilisations (Heath, 2003). ‘It was a common table drink, a desirable trade item, a gift to kings, a medical aid, a ritual offering, and part of nearly every aspect of life as it was shared by family, friends, priests, and kings to celebrate happiness and sorrow, worship and covenant’ (Seely, 1996–7, p. 207).

The spread was partly due to (relatively) peaceful trade and associated cultural influences between independent peoples (Stanislawski, 1975). But much of it was due to colonisation and imperial conquests of Egyptians, Persians, Carthaginians, Greeks, Romans, and multiple others (Inglis, 2022a, 2022b, 2023; Millon, 2013). Elites within empires enjoyed wine, while commoners and the conquered often drank less prestigious beverages (Lissarrague, 2016). Wine was understood by elites as a highly positive symbol, and guarantor of civilised life (Montanari, 2015; Nencini, 1997). A sign of barbarians was that they drank beer (Nelson, 2005, p. 4).

Within the massive territory of the Roman empire, from Britannia in the West to the Near East (Inglis & Robertson, 2004), there was a vast movement of vines, techniques and finished wines, made possible by large-scale transportation of wine-bearing amphorae (Hingley, 2005). The planting of vines in newly conquered territories, and the subsequent adoption – willing or not – of a wine-drinking culture by the indigenous inhabitants in imitation of Roman practice were crucial elements in the rendering of places and peoples into the ‘civilised’ Roman form of life (Serventi & Sabban, 2002).

In pre-industrial times especially, a huge amount of labour went into the tending of vines and grape-picking. Ever more land was put under vine, both in Italy and in the ever-expanding conquered provinces, as the Roman empire grew. Slave labour was more effective than free labour in producing wine, and the free peasantry increasingly migrated to the cities, such that millions of people shifted from countryside to urban areas in the second and first centuries BCE, a relatively rapid and massive urbanisation process not matched globally until London’s population rises more than 1500 years later). The richest landowners owned vast vineyards and became even richer, creating massive socio-economic inequalities between classes (Geraghty, 2007). Ever greater volumes of wine derived from the increasing size of production entities. By the first century CE, only six large proprietors controlled all wine production in conquered Roman North Africa (Johnson, 1989).

The imperial situation meant more wine, of more types, and from further afield was available to Roman elites. A cultural field of wine appreciation developed, with more elaborated aesthetic frameworks appearing which defined which wine styles, places of production and vintages were superior to others (Dalby, 2000; Millon, 2013). Wine snobbery and ostentation were lampooned in Petronius’ text Satyricon: the rich parvenu ex-slave Trimalchio offers to guests at his fabulously vulgar party a celebrated wine that had to be a fake (Purcell, 1994).

Christianity was born within the Roman empire, and came eventually to take it over, in both ideological and institutional terms (Beyer, 1994). Christianity took over ideas about wine from the earlier Greek, Roman and Judaic traditions. It made wine so central to its symbolism and rituals that in its earliest days Jesus was often confused, by both enemies and potential converts, as the Greek god of wine, Dionysos (Friesen, 2014). Wine could not signify ‘the mystery of human nature, the ardo[u]r of the Holy Ghost, the knowledge of the Law, the word of the Gospels, spiritual understanding, the blood of Christ, conscience, contemplation, love’ and other important matters, ‘if it were not itself a product of excellence’. Bread and wine were thereby understood as surpassing ‘in dignity and preciousness all other fruits of the earth’ (Montanari, 2015, p. 141). Beer was again for barbarians, this time the unconverted non-believers (Nelson, 2005).

In Catholic Europe, winemaking became established in European regions relatively far from the Mediterranean. Wine slowly became a marker of Christianity and of ‘European-ness’, such that over time wine was thought to have been made in Europe since time immemorial, the fact that it had really originated much further east being lost to view (Holt, 1993). Wine-drinking Christendom was taken to be superior to the uncivilised Muslim world where wine was (theoretically) banned (Honchell, 2015), while southern and west-central Europe was taken to be more civilised than those northerly climes where more barbarous alcohols and concomitant unconstrained drinking patterns held sway. That cultural fault-line persisted well into the twentieth century (Barthes, 1957/2013).

The movement of winemaking across continents in the second half of the second millennium CE was largely due to European colonialism, together with Christian demands to convert indigenous peoples. As colonies were established in the Americas, southern Africa and parts of east Asia from the sixteenth century onwards, Christian functionaries could not rely on wine being supplied from Europe for the purposes of communion rites. Winemaking knowhow and vines were imported from Europe (Colman, 2008). Spanish Jesuits began wineries in Peru in the seventeenth century. Franciscan monks did the same in Mexico, and then in California, in the late eighteenth century, using wine-based rites as part of their attempts to Christianise local populations (Pinney, 2005).

By the nineteenth century, wine was part of a more secular set of colonial ideologies as to ‘civilising’ conquered territories. In the Americas and Australasia, as well as southern Africa, colonial elites promoted Greco-Roman ideas, filtered through Christian ones, as to the civilising powers of vines and wines. For elites educated in the assumed virtues of Greek cultural refinements and the imperial pax Romana, it seemed natural to think that ‘all powerful nations, since antiquity, had transcendent grape cultures’. Viticulture and viniculture were parts of ‘an international set of colonial tactics for transforming landscapes and for propagating a particular worldview of cultivation and control’ over territories appropriated from other peoples. In California, the planting of vineyards was thoroughly bound up with notions as to the ‘civilising’ of the West (Hannickel, 2013, p. 15). Among the British administrators of nineteenth-century Australia, in addition to taming the landscape through vine planting, wineries had the benefit of creating a supply of ‘civilised’ alcohol that was thought to be able to wean the rough-hewn local settler population off hard spirits and beer, diminishing the rowdiness associated with their lower-class consumers (McIntyre, 2012).

Well into the twentieth century, it was wine’s ‘European’ characteristics that informed how winemakers and marketeers in the colonies understood what they were doing (Brabazon, 2014). It was the most prestigious regions of France – Burgundy, Bordeaux and Champagne – which mainly provided the template for legitimate(d) wine styles (Ludington, 2013). Marketing campaigns that had flourished to cater for the burgeoning tourist trade in post-WWI France stressed the supposed ‘ancient’ lineages of these regions’ winemaking traditions, whether understood as medieval in origin, or as dating from the times of early Christianity, or begun in Roman times. White male-dominated fraternities were created to promote and defend the supposedly ancient traditions of these regions (Whalen, 2009).

Lacking any indigenous cultural associations of their own to draw upon, winemakers and sellers in the first seven decades of the twentieth century in locations like Australia and California were compelled to market their offerings under labels like ‘California claret’ or ‘Australian white Burgundy’, to indicate that the wine was of a certain European style, and therefore was legitimate and worthy of consideration. It was only in the 1980s that avoiding associations with European regions and their wine styles became the norm in such countries, as the local wine industries came to have the cultural confidence to present their wines as being redolent of their own distinctive territories. Critical sensibilities and practices in wine that are (literally) post-colonial in nature have only really emerged in very recent years (Brabazon, 2014).

Winemaking has sometimes stored up trouble for colonisers. Parallels between the monopoly wine production situations of Roman North Africa and French-controlled Algeria in the late nineteenth century are noteworthy here. The French colonial authorities set up Algeria as a major wine-supplier. By the early twentieth century, the country was the biggest wine-producing country in the world, as measured by annual volumes – a remarkable fact for a Muslim majority territory (Pinilla & Ayala, 2002; Simpson, 2011). The indigenous peasantry was thrown off the land in favour of a small number of large industrial wineries owned by big French companies producing vast volumes of low-grade wine. This flooded the market of metropolitan France, turning working-class drinkers away from producers in the winemaking regions of southern France. which had long supplied basic wines to Paris and the major cities. The crisis in sales provoked mass militancy among the peasantry. Wine-related actions in the colonies had profound negative ramifications for the social order of the metropole (Simpson, 2011).

‘Race’, ethnicity and wine

Wine is massively bound up with and shaped by the histories and legacies of the European colonialism that has stretched over the last 500 years, including ethnic divisions and inequalities, and racist modes of thinking and acting. This includes the great predominance of ‘white’ people in the social worlds of wine (Inglis & Ho, 2022).

Mediated landscapes presented in wine marketing and trade materials often show idealised representations of attractive, affluent, young, white people as supposedly typical drinkers of wine. A scattering of other ethnic group people, just as attractive and well-groomed as their white counterparts, may be added to such representations in a usually tokenistic manner (Thach et al., 2016).

The cultural industry surrounding wine – involving mass market books, magazines, courses for non-professionals, tours and vacations – overwhelmingly sells wine to ideal-typically white, higher-class and younger consumers, as part of a broader presentation of cultural authenticity in food and travel, often involving imagery of idyllic rural settings (Inglis, 2015; Pont & Thomas, 2012).

Wine tourism has become an increasingly lucrative field, often centred around notions of timeless winemaking heritages in rural paradises (Meneley, 2007). The winery is shown as a site of attractive leisure pursuits rather than mundane, possibly exploited, labour and techno-scientific manipulation. This presentation may disguise local social tensions, including inter-ethnic ones, the presence of large-scale agribusiness and the exploitation of labour, including ethnic minority or indigenous workers (Peace, 2006). Both visitors and on-site personnel will in most cases be understood by participants to be ‘white’, perhaps more obviously so in Europe and North America, but also in Latin America and in Black-majority South Africa too. In wine promotion for tourists and consumers, internationally recognisable French, Italian or Spanish words, like ‘chateau’, ‘domaine’, ‘cantina’ and ‘bodega’, operate as globally reproducible signifiers of noble, quintessentially ‘European’, and by implication ethically and racially ‘white’, wine heritages (Gade, 2004; Inglis, 2021).

The cultural ‘whiteness’ (Ahmed, 2007; Reiter, 2020) of much wine marketing and tourism imagery is mirrored in participation at wine events around the Developed World, where non-whites are usually very much in the minority. The great majority of wine industry personnel are ethnically white. Many will hold university qualifications in wine management from a relatively small number of institutions in major wine-producing countries (Lagendijk, 2014). These offer broadly identical curricula, usually in English – global business’s lingua franca – which express convergent assumptions about how wine should be made and marketed (Roger, 2010): that is, primarily to white people.

Only in the last two decades have richer and culturally aspirational East Asians entered arenas of selling and drinking wine. The great wealth of some of these actors has given them a certain amount of clout, either as the new owners of vineyards in well-established European regions, or as the target market for premium- and super-premium-priced wine offerings. Despite their entrance into wine-related areas, East Asians are still vastly outnumbered as both wine professionals and connoisseurs by white people. But they have done this so rapidly and in sufficient numbers, and equipped with relatively high financial resources, to be able unwittingly to cause some types of social friction with established white actors (Ho, 2019).

The development of a capitalist economy in the 2000s created new social elites in the People’s Republic of China, ranging from business billionaires to upper middle-class professionals, for whom wine has become increasingly of interest. Collecting and drinking wine allows projection of prized Western forms of sophistication and discernment. While seeming highly culturally legitimate on home turf, such practices often seem vulgar to non-Chinese observers, and redolent of nouveau riche self-aggrandisement (Smith Maguire, 2019; Smith Maguire & Lim, 2015). Acts of apparent cultural sacrilege offending longstanding European norms of wine appreciation, like East Asians drinking expensive wine mixed with ice cubes or soft drinks, became circulating tropes in journalism and social media (Topping, 2011). Resentments have been fostered among nationalistically minded observers when East Asian investors have bought vineyards in France – in so doing dramatising the offence caused to some, on both political left and right, by the notion of the sacred soil of a great vineyard being appropriated by alien capital and ignorant foreign capitalists. East Asian collectors and speculators apparently driving up the prices of fine and rare wines has also been a point of contention (Mustacich, 2015).

If higher-level wine activities are carried out mainly by ‘whites’ and some East Asians, then the back-breaking labour of grape-picking and other physical activities in vineyards are often carried out by non-whites, who can generally expect low pay and poor treatment (McLaughlin, 2013). For example, North African workers in Bordeaux face various forms of discrimination by their managers and the suspicion of local people (Crenn, 2015). Semi-feudal relations between white owners and indigenous workers are characteristic of some wine-producing areas in Latin America (Howland, 2019).

The most discussed case today, in both wine-related media and academic analyses, of troubled ethnic relations in wine production, is that of South Africa (Moseley, 2008). The rapid and disruptive neoliberalisation of the industry there from the 1990s onwards has entailed serious consequences for rural black communities. As grape-growing and winemaking enterprises shifted markedly from domestic to export markets, increased precariousness for labourers followed, and a rural lumpen-proletariat was created, living hand-to-mouth outside of the safety-net of erstwhile white paternalism (Ewert & du Toit, 2005). South African labour conditions have recently become a matter of concern for campaigners, journalists and some industry buyers. The 2016 documentary Bitter Grapes, criticising labour conditions, received widespread publicity when shown on TV in Nordic countries. Whether Fairtrade wine initiatives benefit black employees or not has also become a contentious public issue (Herman, 2019).

Only in very recent years have the longstanding ethnic biases and racist dispositions characteristic of wine-related phenomena been brought into public debate. This trend has been stimulated by the wider Black Lives Matter movement. The US-based wine professional Miguel de Leon (2020), a person of Filipino ancestry, echoes the views of some other ethnic minority people working in wine-related trades when he demands wine’s ‘de-colonisation’:

Traditional wine tasting grids and wheels are biased to Eurocentric flavours, and crucial wine vocabularies can centre on foods completely foreign to . . . [the typically] Asian [p]alate. . . . Wine is rooted in Europe and its white adjacencies, themselves products of colonial and imperialist histories. From Chile to California, we feel the impact of how winemaking was affected by the conscious, hegemonic spread of Christianity. . . . The wine world does not take into account current experiences of its BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour] and LGBTQ+ members. It is steeped in a language that is coded and arcane, tied up with legal jargon and French techniques that only the privileged, monied [primarily white] few are able to decipher. (De Leon, 2020, n.p.)

The points that De Leon makes here sound somewhat like a practical application to wine phenomena of Bourdieu’s (1991) account of the class- and ethnicity-based biases in socially dominant symbolic classification systems, and the kinds of language that they are expressed in. The globally standardised language of wine education and training offered in English can be seen, for example, in the courses and programmes offered by the London-based Wine & Spirit Educational Trust (WSET) (Inglis, 2019b). These are internationally available, but the training always uses the same uniform terminology to describe the properties of wines. The language, and the classificatory schemes underpinning it, are remarkably Eurocentric, and sometimes parochially British too. They are based upon flavours and the English words used to describe them (e.g. ‘brambles’, ‘pear drops’) that people from the UK, North America, Australasia and (some but not all) parts of Europe are likely to have tasted and to understand what the relevant words point to. But both the flavours and the words which depict them are not common elsewhere around the world, and therefore the description may not make any sense to people operating outside of specific communities of language and taste (Robinson, 2020).

The media and internet buzz around the Black Lives Matter movement has already helped to stimulate the growing online presence of groups supporting BIPOC people interested in wine as professionals and connoisseurs, especially in the US and South Africa (Beckett, 2020). Whether such developments can meaningfully happen outside of primarily English-speaking wine producing and consuming territories and can inform more diverse and inclusive forms of wine-related practice in locations such as the notoriously chauvinistic French wine world, is currently an open question (Robinson, 2020). The building of anti-racist counter-institutions in the professional and consumer worlds of wine is still in its early days. Whether a quasi-Bourdieusian thematisation of the issues, as voiced by the likes of De Leon, can help to dislodge ethnically slanted and racist ideas and practices surrounding wine remains to be seen, but it is clearly a significant form of social struggle that will occur over the next several decades.

Wine, gender, patriarchies and masculine domination

Wine production and consumption have been deeply gendered over their entire history (Almila & Inglis, 2022, 2023). Reflecting and expressing wider patriarchal ideas and practices, wine has for millennia been a site of masculine domination par excellence (Bourdieu, 2001), but also of gendered ambiguity and resistance too (Fowler, 2003).

Historically and cross-culturally, women’s wine drinking in comparison to men’s has exhibited the following broad tendencies: it has been subject to markedly more socio-cultural regulation; it has been surrounded by more and stricter taboos; it has been particularly framed in terms of essentialising gendered stereotypes; the symbolic and physical spaces in which it happens have been more circumscribed; women’s wine-relevant agency has been more restricted and more negatively framed (by masculinist thinking); and there have been more dramatic moralising about, and condemnation of, female wine drinking than men’s (Almila & Inglis, 2022).

Throughout vast swathes of time and space, wine has commonly been presented by male-dominated thinking as a chaos-generating threat to patriarchal order. This is particularly because of wine’s alleged particularly negative influences on women, like the drunken loosening of conventional standards of sexual conduct and facilitation of licentiousness (Matasar, 2006), tendencies heightened by women’s putatively lower tolerance of alcohol (Dietler, 2006). Yet wine has also promised sexual pleasures for individual males, due to longstanding and strong associations cross-culturally between wine, seduction and male pleasure (Almila & Inglis, 2022).

Wine has frequently been understood as a threat to orderly domestic space, often leading to bans on female consumption of wine. Among elites of classical Greece, wives and daughters were strictly excluded from the key institution of the symposion (symposium), the wine-centred dinner party. Host and guests were men, but cupbearers, entertainers, and prostitutes who were often present could be female, ancillaries to a highly patriarchal set of social rituals (Lissarrague, 2016). In very many historical contexts, the presence of wine-drinking women in certain public spaces like taverns has connoted their apparent easy sexual availability (Dragadze, 1994; Ho, 2015; Ludington, 2013; Purcell, 1994).

Winemaking labour has been very gendered historically, with men by and large in control of vineyards, wineries and the means of distributing the final product to consumers in locations both near and far (Matasar, 2006). As an agricultural product, winemaking has reflected broader patriarchal norms as to the proper place of women in rural households and agricultural enterprises. Patriarchal myths and magical thinking (Bourdieu, 2001) have abounded. Cases include the potentially polluting nature of women’s presence in winemaking locales (Inglis, 2021), and wine-cellars in some regions being out-of-bounds for women until relatively recently, because females were thought to bring a negative aura and ill fortune (Almila, 2022b). Menstruating women were sometimes considered dangerous for the health of the vines (Bianquis-Gasser, 1992).

Once winemaking became organised according to capitalist demands of profit maximisation, in a geographically uneven set of developments stretching from the seventeenth century CE onwards (Colman, 2008), older patriarchal norms were by and large reproduced, and this situation pertained until very recently in most winemaking regions. Of course, female agency in winemaking locations was possible, but mostly in subterranean and unacknowledged ways, at least until the last few decades (Almila & Inglis, 2022).

Wine appreciation and consumption have also been deeply gendered for millennia. Serious wine connoisseurship has generally implied mastery of the subject matter, a masculine understanding of the possession and deployment of wine-related knowledge (Almila, 2019; Inglis, 2019a). The language to describe wine, which takes its modern form in the eighteenth century onwards, has historically been very gendered. As recently as the 1980s, expressions such as ‘voluptuous’, ‘racy’ or ‘like an old lady’ were standard and acceptable in wine tasting circles (Almila & Inglis, 2023). In male-dominated wine thinking, women cannot make their own informed choices, for they have much less knowledge about wine than men. They are expected to be positively impressed with male savoir faire, even when it is faked (Almila, 2022b; Inglis, 2019a).

One might expect that in the supposedly more enlightened twenty-first century, such dispositions have been transcended, but not so. Longstanding and widespread masculinist cultural assumptions still profoundly impact on women’s self-understandings and behaviours as wine drinkers (Atkin et al., 2007; Barber et al., 2006).

Contemporary empirical research carried out across Developed World countries indicates these tendencies in various ways. While female wine consumption today is less restricted than it has been historically (Remus, 2014), it remains quite gendered in certain respects. Women tend to drink wine marketed to them as compatible with conventional notions of femininity, such as sweeter styles, and more ‘feminine’ rosé and white wines rather than more ‘masculine’ reds (Almila, 2022b). Women have been generally much less confident in their wine selections than their male counterparts. They have been much more reliant on the opinions of ‘experts’, who themselves have been almost exclusively men up until very recently (Ritchie, 2009). Women also regularly estimate their own level of wine knowledge lower than men typically do (Johnson & Bastian, 2007).

While across the Developed World today women buy most of the wine drunk in households, they may well externalise the buying of special occasion wine to male family members (Ritchie, 2009). They may be under more pressure to justify their wine drinking than are men (Almila, 2022a). Wine-buying women rely more on intermediaries, whether human or non-human, such as wine shop personnel or stickers on bottles informing the buyer that the wine has won a prize (Atkin et al., 2007). All of these phenomena are related to female agency and self-confidence being undermined and problematised by wider masculinist socio-cultural environments (Bourdieu, 2001).

After 1945, some new opportunities appeared for women in wine’s professional contexts – domains that they were barely present in beforehand. A few female wine critics began to be mentored by benevolent men, but faced casual misogyny and gender discrimination, such as being excluded from men-only spaces and events typical of the ‘traditional’ wine trade (which in locations like London had been operating for more than half a millennium). Such women could be accused by men of wearing so much perfume that professional tasting was impossible, and of leaving lipstick smears on tasting glasses. Typically ‘masculine’ scents of hair-lotion, aftershave and tobacco were conveniently ignored by the accusers (Vandyke Price, 1990, p. 120). Claims about women using too much perfume can still today be deployed by male customers impugning females’ professional capacities (James, 2020, p. 7). Female wine consumers often feel more easily intimidated by male wine professionals than do men, and some male professionals indeed may seek to intimidate women customers deliberately (Almila, 2019).

Patriarchal and masculinist contexts are not static, at least in complex societies (Fowler, 2003). Women today still face significant career challenges, especially in large corporations (Bryant & Garnham, 2014). They may have to make ‘flexible’ career choices, especially if they have family caring duties (Brenner, 2007). But opportunities for female wine professionals are increasing, albeit in uneven and patchy ways. Women benefit from the contemporary necessity of possessing both academic and professional qualifications to gain entry into professional wine contexts, equalising the otherwise gendered playing field to some extent (Matasar, 2006).

Wine is nowadays sold and served with more focus than previously on empathetic customer service rather than wine knowledge alone, the latter traditionally culturally coded as a masculine capacity, especially when deployed arrogantly. Customers are generally less straightforwardly elitist and more varied today than in the past. Some argue that women are better at serving diverse clienteles (Almila, 2019). Female wine professionals may initially join together simply to avoid feeling isolated in male-dominated environments, but they can win significant benefits through networking, gaining self-confidence professionally through building up support from sympathetic peers and mentors (Ody-Brasier & Fernandez-Mateo, 2017). Books are appearing which reflect on and encourage such developments (Sgarzi, 2022).

Females have set up numerous organisations to promote women in winemaking and wine-related professions. These operate as creatively initiated counter-institutions, challenging the very longstanding male-dominated institutions of wine (Saladino, 2023). Feminist and anti-patriarchal discourses increasingly inform how female wine professionals and commentators frame their – sometimes tacit and sometimes vociferous – opposition to longstanding forms of male dominance in the making, selling and appreciation of wine.² Like anti-racist reframings and counter-institutional practices of wine, the de- and re-gendering of wine will also be a major source of social struggles for more inclusivity in wine worlds for some decades to come (Goeyvaerts, 2021). But it will be riven with ambiguities, including some female actors inventing myths of their own, such as women ‘naturally’ being better wine-tasters than men (Robinson, 2017).

Conclusion

Bourdieusian themes and concepts are necessary but not sufficient conditions for the sociology of wine to develop. They are insufficient in themselves for the purposes of most specific analyses. Yet the sociological study of wine needs Bourdieu, who provides us with, as it were, an oenologic of practice, a general framework for studying wine sociologically.

More specifically, what is needed is a Fowlerian Bourdieu: self-critical, open-minded, flexible and non-dogmatic. This is a figure like a humanist and environmentalist Marx, a figure shorn both of unfortunate prior interpretations and his own intellectual shortcomings, while recalibrated for new, pressing purposes. Any wine-related practice, whether historical or present-day, must be situated within the millennia-long history of the interplay between empires, social class, ethnic inequalities and deeply gendered social relations. These can be understood through the better sides of Bourdieusian ways of thinking, allying these to other useful forms of conceptualisation – even Actor Network Theory, seemingly very hostile to Bourdieusian things, but useful for thinking about ‘the wine itself’.

This will help the sociology of wine develop in at least two ways. First, the study of both ethnicity and gender in wine matters are at the present time in their infancy, and not just in sociology. There are not enough studies about the ethnic ‘whiteness’ of wine on the one side, and the emergence of newer, non-white actors and voices in wine arenas on the other. While the analysis of gender in wine matters boasts of more academic literature, most of it exists within the limited terms of marketing studies. A general Bourdieusian vocabulary that can acutely describe ethnicity and gender issues, both separately and in tandem with each other and with class, sexualities and so on, would help to drive the theoretical resources of the emerging field forward in intersectional ways.

Second, except for some anthropological and geographical writing, much of the multidisciplinary study of the wine industry is not just uncritical of that industry by default but sometimes deliberately so. Many researchers work at universities located in major wine-producing regions in countries like France, the US, South Africa and Australia, and the sometimes rather diffident tenor of what they write about that industry is understandable in that their institutions are industry-facing, and that being critical of major players in the wine field may have various negative consequences, including losing access to valuable insider contacts. But the diplomacy of much social scientific writing about wine can segue into hesitancy that may inadvertently help to disguise some of the more unpalatable features of that industry, as regards issues of exploitation of both labour and natural resources. A Bourdieu-inspired sociological approach is geared to take on unpleasant social realities in bold ways.

Chateau Bourdieu is just one option amongst many to be found in the contemporary wineshop of sociology. It exists as both rival and potential complement to Chateau Latour.³ It has its own distinctive flavours and textures. Bridget Fowler is a cellar-keeper and sommelier at Chateau Bourdieu: not the ‘real’ one in Bordeaux, but rather in its guise as a lush vineyard and sophisticated winery of the intellect. The sociological student of wine, wandering the Chateau’s grounds, may find themselves moved to compose lines like these:

A Copy of La Distinction underneath the Bough,

A Jug of Wine, some Pascalian Medications [sic]

– and Thou

Beside me singing in the Wilderness

– Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!⁴

Footnotes

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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