Anthroenology are pleased to announce that we will be presenting at the Amsterdam Symposium on the History of Food in January 2016. The Symposium topic is ‘Fire, Knives and Fridges,’ and we will be talking about ‘The unproduction of wine: eliding technology in natural and post-modern wine making.’ For more information, see our Talks page: http://www.anthroenology.org/talks/or theSymposium’s page, here:...
Read MoreWe have a guest post over at the Future of Food / Oxford Food Forum: http://www.futureoffood.ox.ac.uk/food-security-forum/blog/market-sustainable-wine Or: http://bit.ly/1xs4mng
Read More
What follows is the third and final part of a lightly edited version of an informal talk I gave recently at Newnham College, University of Cambridge. I’ve divided it up into three parts due to its length. Given that this was an informal presentation, I didn’t bother referencing it. In this version, I’ve added a few suggested readings at the end of the last post. Let me now turn to the final period I want to talk about – from...
Read MoreOne 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...
Read More‘Natural wine’ is a category almost guaranteed to catch the attention of an anthropologist. It is a type of wine that many, if not most, people in the ‘wine world’ agree exists, but they don’t agree on what it is. Some think it pushes boundaries, others think it invokes traditions now sadly lost to modernity, and yet others think it means pretty much nothing. Or pick any combination of the above. To an anthropologist, it is an...
Read More