Wine, Terroir and Utopia

Jacqueline Dutton is Associate Professor in French Studies at the University of Melbourne where she also lectures in wine courses. She has published widely on contemporary French and comparative literature and culture, including a monograph in French on 2008 Nobel Laureate JMG Le Clézio: Le Chercheur d'or et d'ailleurs: L'Utopie de JMG Le Clézio (2003). Utopianism is a key thread in her research on world literature, food writing and travel writing. Her recent work on wine includes articles on identity and authenticity for European winemakers in Myanmar (2016), and on visual codes on French wine labelling for cross-cultural marketing in China and Australia (2019) (academyofwinebusiness.com/). She is currently working on a cultural history of wine in Bordeaux, Burgundy and Champagne.

Peter J. Howland is a former tabloid journalist by mistake, an anthropologist by training, currently a sociologist by occupation (Massey University, Aotearoa New Zealand), and a neo-Marxist by moral and analytical compulsion. He has long-standing research interests in wine production, consumption and tourism and their role in the evolving constructions of middle-class identity, distinction, leisure, elective sociality, notions of rurality and urbanity, and reflexive individuality. He is the editor of Social, Cultural and Economic Impacts of Wine (2014) and author of Lotto, Long-drops & Lolly Scrambles: an anthropology of middle New Zealand (2004).

Wine, Terroir and Utopia critically explores these three concepts from multi-disciplinary and intersecting perspectives, focusing on the ways in which they collide to make new worlds, new wines, new places and new peoples.

Wine, terroir and utopia are all rooted in natural, spatial and temporal realities, yet all are unable to exist without purposeful human intervention. This edited volume highlights the theoretical and analytical lens of diverse scholars, who critically discuss a dazzling array of intersecting realities and imaginaries - economic, political, cultural, social and geological - and in doing this challenge many of our deeply-held responses to utopia. Drawing on an impressive range of international examples from South Africa to Bordeaux to New Zealand, the chapters adopt a range of theoretical and methodological approaches.

This volume will be of great interest to upper level students, researchers and academics in the fields of Sociology, Geography, Tourism, Hospitality, Wine Studies and Cultural Studies. It will also greatly appeal to practitioners and enthusiasts in the worlds of wine production, consumption and marketing.

Wine, Terroir and Utopia critically explores these three concepts from multi-disciplinary and intersecting perspectives, focusing on the ways in which they collide to make new worlds, new wines, new places and new peoples.