Auditing a course at my alma mater has become routine. I sign up and I learn things. I’ve taken French and an anthropology, a translation course as well as one on the role of the senses in literature. The classes have been like discovering that there is a bug under a rock rather than a blender. In other words, yes I have learned things but they were as expected.  The seminar World Histories of Wine, taught by Trinity College history professor Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre was not like the courses mentioned above.

When I stepped into the classroom with about ten undergraduates I expected that the course would help me with my book proposal. I thought I would be examining how histories are put together and what they entail.

What the class did was make me question whether, during my wine sales career, I’d been a stooge for the overall patriarchal and nationalistic nature of the wine industry. If not a stooge, perhaps a mouthpiece for countries that have long held a monopoly on the hegemony of wine.

The seminar was not a wine appreciation course. We did not discuss the grassy undertones of a sauvignon blanc, the lanolin-like qualities of a chenin blanc, or the brioche-like qualities of an older champagne. 

Per the syllabus, “This seminar explores the history of wine, a young and growing research field. We will consider how wine has been produced, traded, and consumed in both continental Europe and the “New World” since circa 1600. We will try to view wine through comparative and world history approaches. Topics will include: approaches to commodity history; wine, terroir and the construction of national identity; protection and global markets; technological change and modernisation; networks, trade and information exchanges; and the creation of consumers and experts.” That description and what the class entailed is like the difference between eating beef Wellington and making one—the former is easier than the latter. 

In class, we examined wine as a commodity just like milk, cheese, sugar, or tea. Yet, we cannot look at those commodities without looking at the political struggles, the colonizing effects, or the economic impacts that affected such commodities.

The course pushed the boundaries of wine writing because the literature we read was mostly written by scholars in such fields as cartography, economics, anthropology, political science, and other academic fields.

The course allowed me to juxtapose the wine reading I have done and examine my career in wine and spirits. The course ended up being a deep dive into wine as a beverage composed of yeast and sugar as well as politics, economics, and culture.

The evaluation of wine as both a cultural subject and a commodity was a unique way to introduce undergraduates to the subject of wine without the marketing hype or romanticism usually attached to it. I was surprised that some of the students were familiar with the sabering of champagne, various cuvees of Dom Perignon, and celebrities associated with luxury wine brands. The same student who sabered champagne at her grandmother’s birthday did not know that Argentina makes wine. The Eurocentric world of wine is a constant at a school that once held a sherry hour following academic and social events.

 The seminar revealed some of the chasm that exists between what some college students knew about wine, how they learned about it, and what the academic readings entailed.

We did not read any Clive Coates, Alice Feiring, or Hugh Johnson. There were no readings by Andre Waugh, Andre Simon, or Andrew Jefford. 

There were two required books. The first was Paul Lukacs’ Inventing Wine: A New History of One of the World’s Most Ancient Pleasures. The book was used to discuss the structure, what questions were not answered, and whether the book added anything new to the body of knowledge. Lukacs is a professor of English and has been writing about wine and culture for a long time. 

The second book was James Simpson’s Creating Wine: The Emergence of a World Industry 1840-1914. Per Princeton University Press, “This is the first book to trace the economic and historical forces that gave rise to very distinctive regional approaches to creating wine.” Simpson is a professor of economic history. 

Both books served as contrasts in what we were looking to do in class. While Lukacs’ book is more popular and currently ranks overall at 982,308 on Amazon, Simpson’s book is more academic and ranks at 2,567,041.

I recognize that the readings we did were in English but we have to ask ourselves what are we missing when we only read in one language. Despite the English-only articles, the writers wrote about Argentina, France, Algeria, South Africa, Portugal, etc.

We read approximately 20 academic papers that added to our collective knowledge of ideas. With each article, we added another perspective and I kept having to think about how my historical book proposal was going to have to consider not just such things as transportation, the elevator, and refrigeration but also politics, science, and chemistry.

Despite the seminar being set in the History department, I think that the seminar also pushed the boundaries because the readings were multi-disciplinary. Quite often departments operate in silos but in this case, anthropologists, economists, geographers, and architectural historians contributed to the overall syllabus. Here are some examples of the readings and their titles:

Marion Demossier’s “Climate and the Crafting of Heritage Value in Burgundy Terroir”.  Demossier is a professor of French and European Studies and a social anthropologist. One would be hard-pressed to read this article and not think about the price of burgundy, politics, and nationalism.

Paul Nugent’s “The Temperance Movement and Wine Farmers at the Cape: Collective Action, Racial Discourse, and Legislative Reform, C. 1890-1965” Nugent is a professor of Comparative African History. The article discusses the temperance movement, the wine industry, and race. The wine company KWV, familiar to wine drinkers of a certain age, played a role in the temperance movement, the wine industry, and racial politics.

Daniel Gade’s “Tradition, Territory, and Terroir in French Viticulture: Cassis, France, and Appellation Contrôlée,” Gade was a professor who taught geography at the University of Vermont. He stated that his “aim in this article is to present a concrete case of how the patrimonialization process works to construct a unique sense of place and to shape rural environment and society.”

Joe Boehling’s “The Sober Revolution: Appellation Wine and the Transformation of France.” Boehling is a professor of history at Portland State University. We read the chapter titled “Appellation Wine and the Transformation of France.” It examines wine drinking and how a variety of organizations and entities worked to increase consumption along with strengthening an allegiance to French wine.

We also read two non-wine related commodities pieces: Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History and Deborah Valence’s Milk: A Local and Global History. From my non-class reading, I would also add Erika Rappaport’s A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World. These readings have allowed me to look at commodity histories that are not as personal and to consider how one shapes the telling of a tale.

Although wine is an ancient practice, we study it in the present. In the wine industry, we prefer not to be inconvenienced by the historical or political controversies of a wine region except as it moves the sale forward. We instead talk about vintages and regulations without consideration of the politics or the culture. When we do speak of wine in the past it tends to be about vintages and climate and less about the politics and the economic structures. 

The seminar also pushed the boundaries of wine because none of the people writing were in the wine business or in the business of writing about wine. Demossier, Nugent, Gade, Boehling, and others consider wine an academic subject to be examined holistically and not separate from its environment. Geography, anthropology, and economics have been applied to the commodity of wine. Wine as cultural history without the gloss of glamour or the marketing jargon allows us to understand wine within political history, economic boundaries, and ethnographic studies. 

Without using the word “decolonization” the course disavows what we have been taught in numerous wine appreciation courses, promotions by regional wine bureaus, and wine dinners sponsored by importers, wineries, and distributors.

It is not enough to know about wine as a separate entity divorced from the state and it is not enough to know the history of wine as presented by popular books. Dispelling romantic notions of the history of wine allows us to reexamine what we already know as well as introduce a younger generation to wine. The romanticism of wine obscures the reality that people in power have shaped our understanding of wine as it is now. Even as wine becomes much more popular there is still the association of it with luxury. As a product, wine’s luxurious image or even its referral as “an everyday luxury” is at odds with its very agricultural and yes, political status. Wines such as burgundy, champagne, and port have entered our consciousness as luxury products divested of the struggles that have occurred in the corresponding regions.

As I expand my knowledge of how I write about wine and spirits,  I cannot ignore other pieces that play into the history of wine as a commodity. Asking ourselves such questions as what is transportation like, what is the price of labor, what is the price of equipment and raw materials, all contribute to a better understanding of wine. Does the rising price of steel make equipment more expensive? How do tariffs impact one particular sector of wine but not another? It may not be as fun as writing a tasting note but at least I can be aware of what the total non-monetary cost of the wine is.

We cannot separate political science, geography, and economics from the world of wine. Wine cannot “stay in its lane” because wine does not spring forth from the ground fully formed and in the bottle. Wine is as much a commodity as sugar and tea, both of which have histories we don’t think about because their tumultuous histories have made their way into the quiet cup of our morning lives.

“World Histories of Wine” pushes the boundaries of wine and it has pushed me to consider wine from a broader angle. When I write about wine now, I have to think, “What else is in this bottle?”