Events dedicated to terroir and wine will be advertised here so feel free to send us any information about forthcoming international events, research seminars and symposiums.
FORTHCOMING
Croatia
MARCH 11-13, 2020OPATIJA. Marion Demossier, University of SouthamptonÂ
Terroir, Heritage and Place-Making. Food for Thought
Panel contribution
Dijon, Wine business conference: Organized in honour of Warren Moran
EASA, Lisbon. This email is to acknowledge your paper proposal for EASA2020: New anthropological horizons in and beyond Europe, into Panel L001: Lab Podcast will be created to include on our website.
Paper title: Wine taste lab: Sensorial subjectivity and storytelling in contemporary wine culture
Co-Authors: Nelson Graburn (graburn@berkeley.edu) Xiang Chun Zheng (zhengxiangchun1981@gg.com)
Paper Short abstract: This practical workshop held by both anthropologists and oenologists in a new urban winery in Belém will investigate how we taste wine. It will engage anthropologists through sensorial ethnography and wine imaginaries to explore taste as a reflexive, individual but also social experimentation.
Paper Long abstract: This practical workshop held by both anthropologists and oenologists in a new urban winery in BelĂ©m, Lisbon will investigate how we taste wine. It will engage anthropologists through sensorial ethnography and wine production/consumption imaginaries to explore taste as a reflexive, individual but also social and collective experimentation. Through a series of wine tastings, it will investigate the connections between sensorial subjectivity and storytelling, especially how winemakers, wine writers and wine consumers mobilize and share “stories behind the bottle” as a means to make sense of a wine’s taste profile. The collective output of the lab will feature as a podcast which will be made available to all participants after the lab.
Note: While the spitting of the tasted wines is recommended, the lab may involve the ingurgitation of small amounts of alcohol. Women should not drink alcohol beverages during pregnancy because of the risk of birth defects. Consumption of alcoholic beverages impairs your ability to drive a car or operate machinery, and may cause health problems.
Max number of participants: 18.
Participation fee: 15 EUR/person.
Local: Adega Belém, Travessa Paulo Jorge 9, 1300-444 Belém
Schedule: between 5pm and 7pm
Pinot Noir NZ 2021, February 2021 – An international 3-day conference held in Christchurch, NZ, with 700 delegates from around the World. The co-chairs of the organising committee, Marion has once again been invited to this event as a Keynote Speaker, primarily to address us on how wine connects humans to land. Helen Masters, winemaker at Ata Rangi in Martinborough and Pen Naish, owner of Black Estate in Waipara write: “Marion’s research, presentations and publications have provided essential input towards putting the event’s themes together and her book, Burgundy: A Global Anthropology of Place and Taste was virtually required reading for the committee!” We have no doubt Marion’s work will continue to inform, educate and inspire our people at the event and in the years following.”
Previous Events
BURGUNDY
Central Otago Burgundy Exchange 10-year Celebrations, Burgundy, October 2017. This was four days of events with 20 winegrowers from Central Otago and many more from Burgundy, marking 10 years of a programme that has seen up to 100 winegrowing interns travel in both directions. Over the years, the exchange structures in both regions have also carried out many initiatives including themed tastings, photographic exhibitions, fund-raising for earthquake relief (Christchurch) and restoration of historical buildings (Abbaye de Saint-Vivant), support for UNESCO World Heritage Candidacy. Marion attended all of the 10-year celebrations in Burgundy as an observer/recorder, with her PhD student Clelia Viecelli, and gave the final speech to those attending in the ancient cellars of the Abbaye de Saint-Vivant. Marion emphasised that she feels the solutions to much of today’s challenging political climate can be found in programmes and practices like those involved in the exchange. The results of the exchange are only partially for the sake of wine. More than that it is about what we learn from listening across cultures, and how that then influences the ways we interact with people in all other activities. There is no doubt that this event and Marion’s part in it had a profound and long-term impact on all involved.
NEW ZEALAND
In recent years, the New Zealand wine industry has benefitted from and enjoyed Marion’s attendance at the following events:
Pinot Noir New Zealand 2013, January 2013 – an international 3-day conference held in Wellington, NZ, with 600 delegates from around the World. Marion was invited as a Keynote Speaker. At this event she provided invaluable humanist counterpoints to the popular notion that pinot noir is somehow “blessed by God”, or steered to greatness with the very limited influence of humans and socio-political influences. Her inferences inspired the country’s winegrowers to celebrate more fully their own identities and that the perceived global hierarchy in wine is more malleable than is often projected by mainstream media.
Central Otago Winegrowers Association, Members Workshop, February 2013 – a one-off event, held as a question and answer session between Marion and 50 of the region’s winegrowers. Central to the discussion were the very human forces at play as the notion of terroir was developed and then codified: Catholic orders, Napoleonic inheritance laws, war, occupation (and resulting damage national identity), poverty, depression, fraud… The conversation primes us to examine our own developing culture and the environments that shape it, for cues of how we should be defining and communicating our craft, rather than simply emulating someone else’s.
Central Otago Pinot Celebration 2020, January 2020 – Whilst Marion will not be attending this event, her work has certainly influenced its themes. Christopher Keys, Winemaker at Gibbston Valley Winery in Central Otago and Chair of the event writes: it is hard for me to overstate how important Marion Demossier’s book Burgundy: A Global Anthropology of Place and Taste is to me personally, but also the thematic direction of our event next year. As a reader and winegrower from New Zealand, I can easily translocate the myths associated with monks in Marion’s case, to clear watered mountains in ours: we perpetuate our truths and untruths in our own way for our benefit. This has striking resonance in New Zealand as we tackle issues of land guardianship versus financial stability.  How is our country going to be operating in the global economy? By revealing the foundations of Burgundy’s historiographic and winemaking constructs, Demossier has provided us a way to understand Burgundy’s mystery, simultaneously provoking questioning of self. No other text I have read on the subject has come close to doing that. I feel that those with the courage to sensitively yet directly question established paragons ought to be valued now more than ever.
UK
University of Sheffield Hallam,GB Wine: The Sparkling wine: Presentation
New Zealand Pinot Noir Festival held in Christchurch in 2021. Watch “Pinot Noir NZ 2017 – Event Highlight”
Top Wine Festical and Events 2019
Pinot Palooza (individual dates, May–December) Multiple locations