‘Converging Terroir Typicity for Political Usage and Didactic Normativity. The Metonymical Institutionalization of Wine in Luxembourg’
December 2019
Dr. Rachel Reckinger published ‘Converging Terroir Typicity for Political Usage and Didactic Normativity: The Metonymical Institutionalization of Wine in Luxembourg’ in Messina, Les Bras, Tedeschi and Vaquero’s A History of Wine in Europe, 19th to 20th Century: Volume II: Markets, trade and the Regulation of Quality.
More about the chapter here
The first volume can be found here
Abstract
The current aestheticization and hyper-differentiation of wines in terms of their region of origin is part of a broader historical process of rationalization. Three vectors have since the 19th century played a key role in the forming of oenophilia: these are regulation by the state, scientific consolidation and dissemination via the media – whose convergent effects have contributed in constructing an object with particular characteristics. This seemingly homogenous object – whose plural even conflictual construction is hardly visible – requires specific consideration also in terms of its consumption: the oenophile gesture, i.e. a reflective, contemplative and comparative attitude, mixing aesthetic and analytical registers, in order to rationalize the pleasure of wine. This cultural figure draws on the normativity of these three vectors, all of which have underscored the importance of the geographical provenance of wine in order to use it depending on their respective positions.
What political usage and didactic normativity regarding the subject of wine have in common is the reference to its ‘origin’. In the economic-juridical and political-symbolic manifestations of the vector of state regulation, this ‘origin’ refers to a cultural region of national sovereignty which is constructed in a metonymic way as the native region of national specificity. In the didactic realizations of oenophile normativity, emerging from the vector of scientific consolidation, this ‘origin’ refers in an epistemic way to parcellated vineyard regions which are constructed as terroirs by the interaction of traditional, man-made viticultural techniques and the natural conditions, holding sensory potentials whose sub-text is of a moral order. Wine’s ‘origin’ is the argument necessary to convey an impression of absoluteness: in the case of politics it is the symbolic uniqueness of the nationality in question, in the case of oenophile normativity, what is aimed for is the sensory and moral uniqueness of every wine whose intention of production was an “expression of the terroir”.
