Contemporary academic research on wine traditionally evolves along several well-established trajectories: works in the field of production oenology, narrowly specialized historical studies, and a broader spectrum of humanities research that approaches wine primarily as an indicator of social status, a mode of sensory experience, or as one of many products within the structure of alcohol consumption. A common feature of these perspectives is that wine becomes reduced either to a biochemical object, to a tool of status differentiation, or to a consumer commodity.
Over the past two decades, however, two new research perspectives have emerged, both aiming to study wine as a holistic phenomenon. The first involves conversation-analytical and ethnographic studies (for example, works by F. Vannini, L. Mondada, A. Hennion) that focus exclusively on wine, the “work” done with and through it, and on its perception, examining wine as a phenomenon with its own internal logic capable of structuring specific social situations. The second direction claiming autonomy has taken shape under the name “sociology of wine,” conceptually articulated by D. Inglis. This approach argues for an understanding of wine not as “yet another” sociological object, but as one that requires special attention to its history, forms of manifestation, collective construction, and, a fortiori, a distinctive methodological configuration.
The general claim shared by these new approaches is the assertion that wine as such has never truly been studied, as it has not been perceived as a self-sufficient object. It has rather served as an indicator for analyzing broader social processes. The new studies, by contrast, claim that focusing on wine reveals implicit (or hidden, latent) dimensions of such “classical” phenomena as inequality, power, ethnicity, and lay–expert knowledge. They also introduce a sensory dimension into the social sciences, moving them into the realm of methodological interdisciplinarity.
Thus, the central question our session seeks to address is justifying the heuristic validity of wine as an independent object of sociological (and more broadly, social scientific, behavioral, and humanities) inquiry. We aim to ask: does concentrating on wine and wine-related phenomena allow us to obtain qualitatively new and sociologically meaningful knowledge that cannot be reduced to other subdisciplines? Or, conversely, can all these results be sufficiently explained within the frameworks of existing paradigms of oenology, economics, and sociology?
To approach this problem, we intend to touch upon the ethical questions of wine research, as well as the boundaries between scientific/applied rigor and artistic/phenomenological imagery when studying wine phenomena. In the context of discussing specific empirical findings, emphasis will be placed on the Russian cultural context.