I’ve been planning for ages to do a post on the unintended consequences of legal definitions. It turns out procrastination means that the world has caught up with my intentions. In late March, INAO – the French organisation that oversees agricultural products (including wine) with geographical indicators – introduced a new category for wine. A previous post had touched on the argument for a legal definition of ‘natural wine.’ The...
Read MoreA spectre is haunting the wine world – the spectre of labels. My apologies to Marx. His spectre – that of communism – was something feared and resisted by the old guard, and thus to be welcomed. The spectre I am referring to is the old guard and thus perhaps a spectre to be exorcised. The terms we use to describe wine – the labels – are a spectre I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. To be blunt, are they more limiting than...
Read MoreIt’s a forthcoming book, edited by Jacqueline Dutton and Peter Howland, and will be published by Routledge, hopefully in 2019. I’m pleased and excited to announce that I’ll have a chapter in the book. My chapter is currently entitled ‘Utopia regained: nature and the taste of terroir.’ The proposed abstract for my chapter follows. As in all things academic, who knows what the final chapter will look like?...
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