Wine: A Social and Cultural History of the Drink that Changed our Lives
Oxford: Infinite Ideas, 2018
Paperback £25
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When Infinite Ideas asked me to write a history of wine, I knew I couldn’t do a conventional, chronologically organized history that ran from the ancient world to the present. I had already done that with A Short History of Wine (2000) and had just updated it as 9000 Years of Wine (2017). But I leapt at the chance to write a book I’d been thinking of for a while: a thematic history. Wine is the result.
There was the question of which themes to pursue. Some were obvious: religion and health, for example. They are important themes in any history of wine. But I had the opportunity to probe some less-considered themes.
One was landscape. Those of us who travel the world of wine are used to seeing not only small, wall-enclosed vineyards, but oceans of vines that stretch to the horizon; not only vines growing on what had been pasture for cattle and sheep, but growing up what seem impossibly steep slopes. Viticulture has altered landscapes in many parts of the world. At the same time, the modern meaning of terroir brought landscape back to the wine as the topological conditions of vineyards have been thought to influence the character of wine.
Another theme in the book is food. The modern obsession with food and wine pairing might seem to make food an obvious theme, but I was interested to see how far back people tried to match particular foods with particular wines. There’s not much in the written historical record before the twentieth century. I examined medieval and early modern paintings of meals – from peasant dinners to extravagant banquets – to see if I could identify patterns of food and wine pairings. The results are surprising.
These are just some of the themes I pursue in Wine. Others are crime, gender, words, and war. It was a fun book to write.
Reviews
“In the span of five years, Phillips has written several important books, including 2016’s French Wine: A History (University of California Press). His industriousness has been our gain, as Phillip’s most recent book, Wine: A Social and Cultural History of the Drink That Changed Our Lives, may be his best work yet… I would make the case that Phillips’s new book may be the best general introduction to the social and cultural history and historiography of wine.”
“Where his previous history books behaved like dispersive prisms, slowing the light and splitting it into single orderly rays of colour, Wine is a reflective prism, flipping and rotating the historical images of wine we have, in order to understand how they have shaped our world and our perceptions of wine today. He delves into relationships such as wine and health, wine and crime, wine and the gender roles, wine and eating, wine and religion – there are more – and in each chapter connects tiny little dots in the past to bring fascinating insights into our present… For anyone interested in cultural and social anthropology and our ever-complex, capricious relationship with wine, this must be the most forensic study out there.”