Uprooting wine

ABSTRACT

The global market for Geographical Indication products is predicated on terroir, the concept of an enduring bond between place, tradition, and taste. Scholarly critiques of terroir have pointed out that the interest in place-based products arose out of the increasingly global circulation of foods and people of the 20th century. I argue that the connection between Geographical Indication products and a world in motion is older, deeper, and worth taking seriously. The development of the raw materials and techniques that give products like wine their unique taste is the result of human mobility and exchange, a process that continues to drive the evolution of the taste of any given place today. Tracing the rise, fall, and reinvention of one of Italy’s most famous sparkling wines, I show how global interconnectedness is at the root of local material heritage and tastes. Beyond theoretical debates, an expansive, outward-looking history of cultural heritage is critical to imagining a more dynamic future for producer communities facing the pressures of international markets, migration, and climate change.

KEYWORDS:

• Terroir
• globalization
• heritage
• mobility
• wine
• climate change

Acknowledgments

The author thanks the reviewers and editors who dedicated their time and care to this article, for which it is much improved, as well as the mentors and colleagues who provided invaluable feedback on earlier drafts of this work. This research would not have been possible without the time, insights, and sincerity that the communities and individuals described here so generously contributed.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Consortia serve as governing bodies for winegrowers and makers within a demarcated geographical zone producing specific denominations of wine. Composed by a committee of growers, buyers, and bottlers, consortia operate as the bureaucratic and organizational middleman between the EU or the state and the industry itself: they set production standards and enforce regulations, decide price minimums, organize regional events, and direct marketing campaigns or brand protection initiatives. Consortia turn practices into codes, delimiting what winegrowers within their jurisdiction can or cannot do in order to sell wine with a Geographical Indication, retaining regional autonomy in standardizing agricultural regulations (Gori and Sottini 2014).

2. Prosecco can be made from a mixture of many grapes, mainly glera but also including verdiso, bianchetta trevigiana, perera, chardonnay, pinot bianco, pinot grigio and pinot noir. The historic growing zone of prosecco grapes remains the area designated for Prosecco D.O.C.G. (Denomination of Origins, Controlled and Guaranteed) producers near Treviso, approximately 7,500 hectares total. Prosecco D.O.C. is grown across a much larger area, approximately 23,000 hectares, that churns out nearly 500 million bottles each year.

3. In Veneto, the mass expansion of prosecco vines, or prosecchizzazione, and the deforestation it fueled was blamed for a landslide that killed four in 2014. Hip wine bars or cafes in Piedmont may display signs that read non prosecchizzazato or include a note on their menu explaining why they are boycotting Prosecco in favor of other sparkling wines.

4. Italian citizenship law is one of the most expansive examples of jus sanguinis (blood right) legislation, in that it can be extended to the descendants of Italians emigrants who have never been to Italy, a legacy of Italy’s global diaspora. It is also markedly restrictive in its jus soli (right by soil) elements, in that the children of non-nationals born and raised in Italy must wait until age 18 to complete a series of bureaucratic hurdles – some impossible for the children of undocumented immigrants – in order to even petition for citizenship. Blood, as a proxy for race, has emerged as the central symbol of Italian right-wing nationalism, whereas soil, and a history of engaging with the land, is an older and deeper form of localized or regional identity in Italy. These two elements meet in the language and marketing symbols of wine, as well as the forms of selfhood and rootedness that wine production confers in Italy.

5. See the Consortium of Asti D.O.C.G website for more details: http://www.astidocg.it/en/storia/.

6. Roman “Italy,” the iconic image of a unified and powerful peninsula, serves as the dawn of wine history in Italian discourses. Sufficiently ancient to support claims of “forever,” the mass production of wine grapes on Roman latifundia for a market that stretched across the continent is prominent in marketing claims of vines with old roots, even if the horticultural and enological practices were wildly different than those practiced today. This version of history glosses over 2,000 years, however, and the agricultural, economic, and social regimes that have come and gone in the meantime.

7. Older forms of Italian agriculture cultivated multiple crops in interspersed plantings for subsistence purposes. Grapevines could be planted on the steep hillsides unsuitable for wheat or corn, or hung between fruit trees. The drawings and photographs of the Astigiano from the nineteenth century depict coltivazione promiscua, promiscuous cultivation, in which widely spaced rows of grapevines are strung between fruit or olive trees, or stretched between poles, and surrounded by cereal crops or legumes, traces of which could still be found in the 1960s (Ratti 1971). This system of vines, orchards, cereals, and legumes both fed the family (and their livestock) and maximized the output of small parcels of land.

8. For more details and statistics from Gancia’s history, see http://www.gancia.it/.

9. See Gancia’s online archives at http://www.gancia.it/gancia/public/storytelling.

10. Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) was designed to regenerate European food supplies after post-World War II shortages and facilitate trade within the European community. Initiated in 1962, it heavily subsidized agriculture to encourage production increases and efficiency, guaranteeing farmers price minimums for their total production independent of market fluctuations. This resulted in widespread overproduction by the 1980s, creating surpluses of beef, dairy, and wine, the so-called wine lakes and butter mountains, at immense costs to taxpayers, farmers around the world, and European environments. CAP has since been significantly amended to reduce costs and negative impacts, but remains a highly contested and conflict ridden set of policies in agricultural and political circles.

11. Moscato did see a small spike in sales after it was spotlighted by the hip-hop community in 2013 (Sanders 2013).

12. See the interview with Maria Teresa Mascarello in the documentary Langhe DOC: storie di eretici nell’italia dei capannoni (2011).

13. See Michael Herzfeld’s work on heritage classification and preservation (1991, 1997, 2014), in particular the conflict between the people who live within it and the vision of preservation, promotion, and gentrification that official policies push upon them.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rebecca Feinberg

Rebecca Feinberg is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research explores food and wine in a global context, highlighting the relationships forged between people and their social and natural environments through the production and consumption of food. She currently teaches and administers the Master of Arts in Global Thought program at Columbia University.