Zachary Nowak
Gastronomica 14 (3), Fall 2014.
Publication year: 2014

“Rachel Black and Robert Ulin’s edited collection on wine is a timely contribution to academic discourse on wine. The editors explain in their introduction that the paucity of anthropological writing on wine is a result of the discipline’s historic focus on the Other, as well as on wine’s status as an intoxicating substance (and thus not appropriate for serious study). This volume, with fifteen chapters organized into four thematic sections, aims to be—as the subtitle suggests—an investigation of wine from ‘vineyard to glass.’ Even more importantly, the volume moves studies of wine from France and Italy to other loci of production, acknowledging that however local it begins, wine is often a truly transnational product…”