Towards a Sociology of Wine: The Power of Processes

Abstract

This paper is concerned with how to construct a sociology of wine. It begins by considering the sociologist’s relations to wine, making comparisons to how sociologists relate to music and to art. It comments on the interplay between a love of wine and a sceptical attitude towards wine world phenomena. The major part of the paper concerns proposals to create a sociology of wine based around sociological conceptualisation of long-term processes. This kind of sociology takes as its object of analysis wine’s whole 8,000 year-old history, and how wine has travelled around the world. Various -ization and -fication processes are identified, as are the multiple interplays between them. In so doing, a general framework for the sociology of wine is laid out.