Pinot Priests, Pilgrims and Palooza: From the Sacred to the Profane?
Peter J. Howland
I explore producer and consumer identities generated within, and simultaneously generative of, the Pinot Noir economy methodologically situated in contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand. A blessed, somewhat playful, undertaking that deploys the theoretical lens of explicit and implicit religiosity (Bailey 2010) and which is fortified with a healthy dosage of neo-Marxist/Bourdieuan critique.
Pinot Noir production is mythically and genealogically (Appadurai 1996) traced back to the explicitly religious winemaking of Burgundian monks and monasteries in the 10th and 11th centuries. Whereas contemporary New World production, marketing and consumption of both fine and banal Pinot Noir is no longer the reserve of cloistered winemaking or even of colonising missionaries, but is instead significantly commercialised, technologized and/or industrialised. Nevertheless New World ‘Pinot’ routinely generates a dialectic rhizome of implicit religiosity and sacredness (Howland 2019a).
Thus at one rhizomic node we find artisan, urbane, frequently hospitable, winemakers (or the ‘Pinot Priesthood’) dedicated to producing fine Pinot Noir, together with their followers (from connoisseurs to aesthetically appreciative consumers) who represent an increasingly globalised coterie of reflexive, middle-class ‘Pinot Pilgrims’ (Howland 2004; 2019b). While at another node we find instead the massed hoi-polloi of Pinot Noir imbibers (‘Pinot Plonkers?’) equally pursuing ‘sovereign consumership’ (Olsen 2019), albeit most often through a comparatively profane ferment of palatable taste, alcoholic ‘buzz’, product availability, ‘affordable’ price points and companionate drinking. Although deploying different, yet imbricative, modalities, these varied cohorts nevertheless all habitus-ually reaffirm (performatively and subconsciously) the moral ideals and implicitly sacred rites of neo-liberalism and ideal reflexive individuality (Howland 2008: 2013) – devotions that generate what Emilé Durkheim provocatively termed the ‘cult of the individual’ or the ‘cult of humanity’ (1968 [1898]).
Moreover, Pinot Pilgrims swoon with neo-romantic rapture at the grounded, sanctified nature implanted at the core of terroir mythologies (Matthews 2016), and of which venerated vineyards are framed as sacred sites of idyllic/ metro-rural/ aficionado communion (Howland 2008; 2022), while the hoi-polloi are more likely to ascribe to the ‘cult of the factish’ (Latour 2010) and fetishise any winemaking technologies (including AI, robotics, genetic engineering, synthetic wines) that seek Ritzerian (1983) consistency of taste, beverage safety, security of supply and which keep prices ‘low’.
Peter J. Howland has a long-standing research interest in wine production, consumption and tourism, and how they generatively intersect with the evolving constructions of middle-class identity, social distinction, leisure, reflexive individuality and elective sociality; associated notions of space, place, time and temporality; commodity and gifting moral economies; and so on. He is the editor of Time and Alcohol: It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere! (2025: Routledge, UK); Wine & The Gift: From Production to Consumption (2023: Routledge, UK); co-editor (with Jacqueline Dutton, University of Melbourne) of Wine, Terroir and Utopia: Making New Worlds (2019; Routledge, UK); editor of Social, Cultural and Economic Impacts of Wine (2014: Routledge, UK); and author of Lotto, Long-drops & Lolly Scrambles: An Anthropology of Middle New Zealand (2004; Steele Roberts, Aotearoa). In 2019 he was appointed as a founding editor of the series Critical Beverage Studies for Routledge UK.