Posts by Chris

The ideas behind this post are still vague phantoms that refuse to take concrete form, but as I tell my students, writing is often a good way of thinking ideas through. What I am trying to think through here is the concept of ‘translating the senses.’ The fact that we should be paying attention to other senses than the visual is fairly well-established in anthropology and related fields, even if it is perhaps more honoured in the...

This post is something of a follow-up to my previous one, on ‘wine-sensing.’ This time, and in the following post, I want to consider talking and writing about wine, in part as a way of trying to sort out ideas for an academic paper I’m working on. Anyone visiting this website is probably familiar with the stereotypes of pretentious wine snobs and their descriptions: an elegant if demanding wine, at the peak of maturity, with hints of...

Wine-sensing. This somewhat odd term is what actually happens in ‘wine-tasting’. It is also what makes wine an interesting object to study in terms of taste and the senses while also a challenging one from an ethnographic viewpoint. My point is simply that the term we all use – wine-tasting – gives priority to one sense, when in fact, tasting wine relies on multiple senses, particularly if you are doing a more analytic tasting,...

While not as radical as natural wine in its impact on taste, biodynamic wine-making is more likely to be encountered by most wine-drinkers, even if they are not aware of it. Further, even people sceptical of the philosophy and ideas behind the biodynamic approach often will admit it makes interesting wines. So what is biodynamics? In short, and not completely inaccurately, biodynamic farming is like organic farming with a spiritual...

One aspect of natural wine that I didn’t cover in my previous post on the topic is its relation to what is known as ‘typicity’ and the implications of this. Typicity ‘is of broad importance in defining what a wine from a region will be like’ (Farmer 2013, 156). In other words, typicity is about what a wine should and is expected to taste like. In France it is linked to the AOC system, and parallels hold elsewhere. Simply because a...