Wine

Wine has the paradoxical quality of being both ordinary and special: a simple food item to be consumed with a meal, it is also widely used as both a symbol in religious ritual and a means of changing human mood or consciousness. As a result, wine often has multiple meanings within consumer culture, connected to life and death, health and pollution, purity and spirituality, and conceptions of order and disorder. Wine choices typically reveal social distinctions of age, sex, status, culture, and even occupation.

Historians have suggested that patterns of consumption and the subsequent spread of wine production were linked to the symbolic requirements of many religious cultures. The spread of Christianity that accompanied European voyages between 1500 and 1750, in particular, facilitated the circulation of wine as a global commodity. Viticulture and patterns of wine consumption spread along with European colonization and influence. It should be noted that wine was made in many societies prior to this period by fermenting the juice of fruit. But by the era of the Enlightenment, the most successful global commercially marketed wine was based on grapes. Today, those grapes are almost exclusively Vitis vinifera, a hybrid developed in France and subsequently transplanted around the world. Wine and V. vinifera grape vines are cultivated and consumed in a variety of forms, from distilled alcohols, which are relatively uniform, to fermented drinks with remarkable variations.

The seventeenth century marked a turning point in world wine consumption. Consumption of alcoholic beverages increased throughout Europe but, particularly, among the urban poor. Fortified wines and those with higher alcohol content met this new consumer demand. At the same time that demand expanded in Europe, a major wine market developed in the Spanish colonies of South America and the English colonies in North America and in Australia. Capital was invested in production to improve overall quality and to develop new wines to meet changing consumer tastes. Some of these new wines—such as champagne, port, and the new clarets of Bordeaux—were expensive to produce and therefore out of the reach of the mass of consumers. Historians have suggested that these wines appealed to the ruling classes, in particular, as a means of symbolically preserving their social position. At a time when other types of wines and alcoholic beverages were increasingly integrated into the daily diet, these new, expensive wines were consumed by elites as part of an aesthetic experience, a sign of connoisseurship, and a symbol of their wealth, status, and prestige.

[Page 1530]Under the influence of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, medical doctors stressed the health benefits of wine to consumers and scientists of various kinds who turned their attention to all aspects of viticulture and wine making to improve production techniques. France emerged in this era as a leader in the development of wine culture. Enlightenment thinkers, such as Montesquieu, noted that in France there existed many wine models that catered to a growing range of consumer tastes. These wine models were imitated in other wine producing areas.

Differentiating wines based on standards of quality became a preoccupation in the nineteenth century as wine prices dropped and consumer markets expanded. The French remained a leader in wine culture by developing a system of ranking in the early 1800s. Many of the most prestigious French wines bore the name of the place where they were historically produced. Names of villages, provinces, or pays were frequently used to designate a wine style—Bordeaux, Burgundy, or Champagne—and its link to a particular area of production. Wine writers and taste professionals used these categories and ranked wines within them. The first rankings were the result of a consensus that there were a handful of Bordeaux estates (Margaux, Latour, Lafite, Haut-Brion) that stood apart from the mass of production. By 1855, these rankings were made more explicit and detailed for the Universal Exhibition in Paris. These standards were adopted by consumers and remain in use a century and a half later.

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