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by Franck Celhay, an associate professor at Montpellier Business School, explains, with nicely illustrative examples of each case, how and why certain typefaces and fonts communicate their different, almost subliminal messages—for example, uppercase letters with serifs = serious; lowercase in a style that mimics handwriting = “friendly and simple.” Some of the essays work as social
history. I learned a great deal, for example, from an article by French historian Sénia Fedoul about the competing claims of “scientific agronomists” and sommeliers for the right to define what exactly was meant by wine quality and expertise in interwar France—a battle between the “industrial” chemists and the “hedonic” sommeliers that ended in compromise and led to a contemporary approach that draws on both traditions. A piece tracing the fluctuating size and shape of the Champagne glass by another of the Handbook’s editors, Graham Harding, a specialist in wine history at Oxford University, is likewise full of fascinating historical detail. According to Harding, the “first unequivocal 19th-century reference to the saucer shape of Champagne glass that became the fashion in the late 1840s or early 1850s” was made by Benjamin Disraeli in a description “of a dinner given by the wit and dandy George Bulwer-Lytton in 1832.” “[W]e drank our Champagne out of a saucer of ground glass mounted on a pedestal of cut glass,” Disraeli writes to his sister. Almost 150 years later, the style has lost its allure. Harding quotes the British wine critic Pamela Vandyke Price, who, in 1977, complained to her readers
There is always an effort to engage with big questions about why we like the wines we do, why we talk about wine the way we do, why some wines have a higher status than others, why wine has its singular significance in modern society, and why wine means so much to so many
52 | THE WORLD OF FINE WINE | ISSUE 79 | 2023
in The Times that “shallow saucers give a mean measure, flatten the wine quickly, and cheat the drinker out of the delectable smell.”
Engaging with the big questions As is always the case in these essays, Harding is as much interested in what those historical nuggets have to say about wider cultural trends and ideas about wine as he is in the details themselves. He says that “the evolution of the [Champagne] glass over time, from ale glass to saucer, from saucer to flute, and then to the tulip shape, […] reflects changes in both society and wine appreciation.” If you read the book as I did (over a period of many weeks) from cover to cover, you begin to grasp a kind of thematic consistency across its apparently disparate elements. It’s not that each contributor shares the same opinions or perspectives—far from it. The variety of ideas and approaches is one of the book’s many strengths, and coordinating editor Steve Charters MW and his fellow editors deserve great praise for the diverse team of writers they’ve assembled. But there is a persistent effort, observable in every piece, to engage with big questions about why we like the wines we do, why we talk about wine the way we do, why some wines have a higher status than others, why wine has its singular significance in modern society, and why wine means so much to so many. For the editors, possible answers to each of these questions—or at least profitable and illuminating ways of attempting to answer them—can be found in various forms of cultural analysis. It’s an approach that is laid out in the book’s preface, which explains how the project was conceived as a way of interrogating how “wine relates to place, belief systems, and accompanying rituals; how it may be used as a market of the identity and mechanisms of civilizing processes (often in conjunction with food and the arts); how its framing intersects with science and nature; the ideologies and power relations which arise around all these activities; and the relation of this to wine markets and public institutions.” It’s an enormously complex blend, which leads to some wonderfully creative thinking—none more so
“Wine is one of the world’s most unifying and divisive products. It is sacred and profane, revered and reviled, healthy and injurious, made for profit, for love, and sometimes for loss. The global industry involves myriads of convergent and divergent perspectives”
than in Dutton and Howland’s piece “Competing and Complementary Utopias,” where the authors draw on the ideas of French philosophers and literary theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s anti-hierarchical metaphorical concept of the rhizome, with its “assemblages” of “objects, practices, experiences, and representations that make sense together,” as a way of thinking through the competing ideals we find in various parts of the wine world. “Wine is one of the world’s most unifying and divisive products,” Dutton and Howland say. “It is sacred and profane, revered and reviled, healthy and injurious, made for profit, for love, and sometimes for loss. The global industry involves myriads of convergent and divergent perspectives that, depending on one’s role in the chain from production to consumption, may be influenced by region or national identity, cultural capital, economic power, political tensions, or, quite simply, by variations in taste.” Dutton and Howland’s mapping of these various elements is just one of the ways in which this endlessly invigorating compilation pursues its brief. But whether its writers are examining the connections between wine and religion, exploring competing notions of terroir, or performing a close reading of The Times’s long- running Saturday wine column by Jane MacQuitty, the Handbook reaches far beyond an academic audience to take the open-minded general reader to places where more mainstream wine books fear to tread.
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