The authors
Professor Marion Demossier established this website following three decades of ethnographic research on terroirs and grands crus wine production conducted in Burgundy. Her aim is to challenge current assumptions about terroir defined as an area or terrain, usually rather small, whose soil and micro-climate determine distinctive qualities to wine. This definition of terroir provides the ideological basis of the EU-wide wine quality classifications and production laws, especially the PDO (Protected Denomination of Origin). For many wine professionals and consumers, geology is claimed to be the primary factor in the production of great wines. Her defence of cultural differentiation based on human action and reason seeks to open a new line of interdisciplinary debate to think critically about quality wines and to influence both artisanal and more traditional wine production methods.
Marion DEMOSSIER is Professor of French and European Studies in the School of Modern Languages and Linguistics, Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Southampton University. She holds a Ph.D in Social Anthropology from the EHESS (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) in Paris. She has published more than twenty scholarly articles in leading academic journals in Britain, France and the United-States, including the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Cultural Analysis, the Anthropological Journal of European Cultures and Modern and Contemporary France. The University of Southampton provided the funding for this website.
Clelia Viecelli is a PhD student in Modern Languages and Linguistics at the University of Southampton. Her research project is an ethnographic account of female winegrowers producing “natural” wines in Northern and Southern Italy. She holds a Master of Science in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a BA with honours in Anthropology from the University of Siena (Italy). She is also a trained sommelier and a member of the oldest national organisation of wine tasters in Italy (ONAV).
Shawnee Harkness is an Ethnography PhD candidate at the University of Southampton. She holds a BA in Anthropology, minoring in Sociology and Fine Art from the University of Minnesota, Duluth and a MSc in Social Anthropology from the University of Edinburgh. She has recently finished 13 months of multi-sited fieldwork (Scotland & France) which produced the following themes: drugs and drug culture, exchange relations and social practices, friendship and lifestyle, youth transitions and mobility. Shawnee has published in the University of Southampton graduate journal Emergence, ‘What’s So Cool About Craft Beer: Youth culture and the craft beer boom’.
Selected publications
