Wine isn’t static. It evolves according to our changing understanding of nature, science, aesthetics, nourishment, thirst, the works. When I look at some of wine’s newest gestures, like the ascendency of natural wine, or regenerative viticulture, or wine’s integration into new rituals and occasions, I see genuine departures from modern paradigms in both practice and attitude.
As a writer, I use narrative to make sense of these shifts. I read my peers’ writing along with academic literature about wine writing itself, digging into papers by critics, economists, mathematicians, philosophers, historians—anyone training their gaze and research methods on it.
I’ve mostly focused on the developments of the last half-century, but more recently decided to broaden my scope and consider antecedents. I’m developing a big spreadsheet tracing the evolution of wine as cultural production, specifically using the lenses of premodernism through modernism, postmodernism, and metamodernism.
Critical frameworks like these help make sense of protracted, often messy cultural arcs, but they aren’t neat and tend to bleed into each another at the edges. We can always find prophets ahead of their time, and artifacts that kick around after culture’s moved on. My goal with this exercise is to look at how each era influenced the ways in which wine was thought about and discussed, and to consider what that means for wine commentary. This swiftly became an epistemic exercise: How do we decide what’s true? And how does language serve those truths?
I’m planning a longer paper on all of this, with more examples and citations and further expansion on my findings. My purpose today is simply to sketch these ideas to invite feedback and insight.
Before I get to the discussion, a disclosure of bias: My academic training is in Western artistic and literary production and criticism, and my wine expertise is essentially adjacent, so I used the Western rubrics with which I’m familiar. A scholar working from another cultural vantage point would have a different take (and I’d like to read it).
Wine in premodernity
During the premodern period, by which I mostly mean pre-Enlightenment, wine quenched thirst but was also central to ceremonies and rituals. It was used to purify, supplicate, even medicate. Wine was used as a commodity to enrich both Church and State. Wines were celebrated for their typicity, their adherence to character. Wine producers, too. Farmers worked at the mercy of their territories but also within strictures of generational expectation. And everyone, peasants and priests alike, drank the local wine, because all wine was local wine.
People put their faith in tradition, in the wisdoms of the past, but they were not anti-technology; no society survives long without embracing innovations to make it safer, healthier, happier. But new technologies were pressed into the service of perpetuating rather than renovating wine’s historical and regional forms. Wine narratives centered questions like "Does the wine feel of this place?" and "Is the wine the way it’s supposed to be?"
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