Vinum Regum: Classic themes in fine drinking stories

ABSTRACT

Drinking stories are a narrative genre that revolves around drinking and its functions. While drinking stories commonly refer to large amounts of alcohol, young people, transgressive meanings, and interactional goals, the article focuses on the practice of fine drinking, a type of drinking that is characterised by quality, service, and atmosphere. The present article scrutinises the content of adults’ drinking stories when there is no intoxication involved by analysing interviews with Italian participants who come from different sectors of alcohol production, distribution, and consumption. In this contribution, fine drinking stories are regarded as a sub-genre of drinking stories because of some specificities that seem to characterise them. The analysis results in six main themes that show a cultural imperative in playing a central part of Italian enogastronomic tradition and in protecting people from heavy episodic drinking.

KEYWORDS:

• Alcohol
• drinking story
• drinking genre
• fine drinking
• narrative analysis
• narrative

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics standards

The author declares that informed consent was obtained from all subjects before they were included in the study and no real identifying information about the subjects is included in the article.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fabio Indìo Massimo Poppi

Dr. Fabio Indìo Massimo Poppi is Assistant Professor/ Research Associate at the University of Łódź (Poland) and Associate Professor at Sechenov Moscow University (Russian Federation), with an interdisciplinary background in Critical discourse studies, Pragmatics, Social cognition, Italian culture, Art and Film studies. He is currently involved in a project that examines the interface between humour (both verbal and non-verbal) and impoliteness in social media communication, testifying that online aggression can serve humorous purposes and that online humour may originate in aggression, whether genuine or feigned (e.g. Dynel and Poppi 2019; 2020; 2021). At the same time, he works on processes of ideology construction, violence, organized crime (e.g. Poppi and Ardila 2021) and sex-related phenomena (e.g. Poppi and Sandberg 2020) often using a narrative, interactional fantasizing or discourse analytical approach.

Franca Beccaria

Franca Beccaria, PhD., is a sociologist, partner in Eclectica, a research institute in Torino (Italy), vice-director at the EMDAS, European Master on Drug and Alcohol Studies, University of Torino (Italy) and Associate professor (title of docent), Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki. Affiliate: University of Helsinki Centre for Research on Addiction, Control and Governance (CEACG). Her main research interests are drinking cultures, drugs, gambling, addictions, health promotion and health policies, stakeholders and community engagement, and sociology of health.