Wine: A social and cultural history
of the drink that changed our lives
is a wine history with a difference. Most histories of wine (like Hugh
Johnson's The Story of Wine, Paul
Lukacs's Inventing Wine, and Rod
Phillips's own A Short History of Wine)
are chronological narratives that begin with wine in the ancient world and run
through to modern times. Wine has been seen typically as the subject of broader
historical trends and events - how, for example, economic and diplomatic
conditions favoured or interrupted the wine trade, and how changes in taste
affected wine styles.
Wine departs from these approaches by
organizing chapters by theme and by focusing much more on how wine has been
positively and actively implicated in broad historical changes. It looks at the
way wine has been used to demarcate social groups and genders, how wine has
shaped facets of social life as diverse as medicine, religion, and military
activity, how vineyards and wine cultures have transformed landscapes, and how
successive innovations in wine packaging - from amphoras to barrels to bottles
- have affected and been affected by commerce and consumption.


Wine neither sees the history of wine as the passive
result of historical forces nor sees wine as a prime agent of historical
change. Rather, it views wine as a critical actor in key trends in the
histories of society, culture, and the environment. Each chapter takes a single
theme and the material within each is organized chronologically. The book is
formed of chapters that together provide a compact and theme-specific history
of wine in its own right, enabling readers to consume chapters as
self-contained units, rather than as parts of a longer narrative whole. This is
an ideal reference resource for wine lovers and historians alike.