Wine and The Gift (Routledge Critical Beverage Studies)

Wine as commodity has received enormous academic attention, while wine as gift has largely eluded significant dedicated research and analysis. This book addresses this lacuna with insights from leading scholars from a range of disciplines exploring wine as gift in different moments of history, across a variety of production to consumption contexts, and across societies and cultures. The book draws on examples from Australia, China, Croatia, France, Italy, Moldova, United Kingdom and Aotearoa New Zealand. Through the analysis of wine as gift, indeed often as a commodity-gift hybrid, this book significantly enhances understandings of the intertwined economic, societal, political and moral aspects of wine and its production, exchange, and consumption.

Wine and the Gift: From Production to Consumption will appeal to researchers and undergraduates from a wide range of disciplines, including sociology, history, anthropology, cultural studies, geography, marketing, and business studies.

Peter J. Howland is a former tabloid journalist by mistake, an anthropologist by training, a sociology lecturer at Massey University, Aotearoa New Zealand, by occupation, and a neo-Marxist by analytical and moral compulsion. He has long-standing research interests in wine production, consumption and tourism and their role in the evolving constructions of middle-class identity, distinction, leisure, elective sociality, constructions of place, and reflexive individuality. He is author of Lotto, Long-drops & Lolly Scrambles: An Anthropology of Middle New Zealand (2004); editor of Social, Cultural and Economic Impacts of Wine in New Zealand (Routledge, 2014); and co-editor (with Assoc. Prof. Jacqueline Dutton, University of Melbourne) of Wine, Terroir and Utopia: Making New Worlds (Routledge, 2019). In 2019 he was appointed as a founding editor of the series Critical Beverage Studies for Routledge UK.