The noble grapes : the canon of grapes and the literary canon. On balance : numbers, words, and wine on a page -- Death of the winemaker : are winemakers artists? -- On the supermarket pastoral and natural wine -- Postmodern viticulture -- The noble grapes : the canon of grapes and the literary canon.
Summary:
"This book examines controversies in American wine culture and how those controversies intersect with and illuminate current academic and cultural debates about the environment and about interpretation. With a specific focus on the United States of America, the methods that we use to discuss literature and other art are applied to wine-making and wine culture. The book explores the debates about how to evaluate wine and the problems inherent in numerical scoring as well as evaluative tasting notes, whether winemakers can be artists, the discourse in wine culture involving natural wine and biodynamic farming, as well as how people judge what makes a wine great. These interpretative commitments illuminate an underlying metaphysics and allegiance to a culture of reason or feeling. The discussions engage with a broad range of writers and thinkers, such as Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Louis Menand, Michael Pollan, Greg Garrard, John Guillory, Amitov Ghosh, Pierre Bordieu, and Barbara Herrnstein-Smith. The book draws upon not only a number of texts produced by wine critics, wine writers, literary critics and theorists but also extensive interviews with wine writers and multiple California winemakers. These interviews contribute to a unique reflection on wine and meaning. This book will be of great interest to readers looking to learn more about wine from cultural, literary and philosophical perspectives"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.