On Wine, Globalization, and Glocalization: Long-Term Developments and Present-Day Controversies

David Inglis

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Chapter 13 On Wine, Globalization, and Glocalization

Long-Term Developments and Present-Day Controversies

In: Globalization/Glocalization: Developments in Theory and Application

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David Inglis

David Inglis
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 237–259

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004500365_014

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Although wine may not seem to be all that similar to football, the next chapter, by David Inglis of the University of Helsinki, shows just how similar the two are when it comes to the question of how globalization works within the Robertsonian frame. Beginning from the observation that wine in today’s world is fairly homogenized in terms of production and consumption (a narrow range of bottles, sizes, grapes, tastes, production techniques, perceptions of quality, etc.), the author points out that the homogeneity presents itself in terms of diversity or heterogeneity: wines are mostly ‘the same’ around the world, but they are produced, marketed, and consumed in terms of their difference, each wine’s uniqueness in terms of character and specific origin. Unlike the case for football, however, Inglis is also able to trace the history of wine throughout the phases of globalization – including the globalization demonstrated by historical imperial formations such as the Roman or the Chinese, empires of Steger’s Great Universalizing phase – and to show that it has always been so: wine is uniform or universal but understood, especially by elites, as inherently different or particular. As the author puts it, “wine has … for a very long time been a globalized and globalizing entity par excellence”. In more recent phases, Inglis shows that wine has served as an agent of European colonization in various parts of the world; and then in turn as a global form that various national and regional entities fill with reconstructed local content and thereby assert their particular identities in the global context. And much like local styles in football are actually globally circulating variations that are reconstructed as ‘local’ and particular to a club or country, so is wine universally particularized, especially, as the author demonstrates, through the idea of ‘terroir’: a word that embodies the notion of the local ‘soil’, the idea of uniqueness, as well as a particular – terroir is a French word first used by French winemakers – that has become universal. Terroir points to the fact that everyone is doing the same thing, but doing it differently. Here again, we have a concrete case of how globalization enacts itself through glocalization that constructs itself in relation. Even as we do the same thing differently, we communicate the differences, be they ever so small, as indicative of what each of us essentially is in relation to all the others.

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Globalization/Glocalization: Developments in Theory and Application

Essays in Honour of Roland Robertson

Series: International Studies in Sociology and Social Anthropology, Volume: 139

Cover Globalization/Glocalization: Developments in Theory and Application

E-Book ISBN:: 9789004500365

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 19 Nov 2021

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Chapter 13 On Wine, Globalization, and Glocalization

Long-Term Developments and Present-Day Controversies

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Globalization/Glocalization: Developments in Theory and Application

Essays in Honour of Roland Robertson

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