Intersecting Pinot Noir: Applying Sociological Secateurs to a Grape Varietal (Which Doesn’t Deserve Such Ignominy)
Anna-Mari Almila
David Inglis
While the analysis of wine and human identities has progressed on various fronts in recent years, the explicitly sociological study of wine remains inchoate, especially as regards issues of genders, sexualities, class positioning, and related matters. A satisfyingly intersectional account of wine in general, and particular wine phenomena more specifically, is not yet available. One way to develop such an analytic perspective is to consider a specific grape variety in light of, and taken in relation to, intersecting social phenomena. In this paper, we foreground social dynamics of gender, gendering, and sexualising of Pinot Noir in primarily, but not exclusively, Anglophone and Anglo-Saxon socio-cultural and semiotic contexts. We show how Pinot Noir has been gendered as ‘female’ and sexualised accordingly by (male-produced) wine commentary. Yet, when blended in Champagne, the same grape is discursively attributed with more masculine characteristics, thought to possess the power to masculinise particular wines. The grape’s semiotic affordances are therefore both rigidly stereotypical and simultaneously gender fluid. Criticisms have been articulated in wine circles alleging the (hetero)sexism or ultimate meaninglessness of such gender stereotypes and their application both to certain wines and to Pinot Noir and other grape varietals. Counter-arguments have then arisen from gay and queer commentators, who claim that gender attributions of femininity and masculinity to, for example certain villages of the Côte d’Or, are indeed viable lenses for making sense of the wines’ qualities. The paper seeks to relate these more detailed matters to broader and long-term contours of genders, sexualities, social class, and other societal hierarchies. It thereby constructs a working model of how to intersectionalise the study of wine and human identities, which encompasses both empirical analysis and the critique of modes of sexism, misogyny, ethnocentrism, and other related forms of prejudice and power.
Anna-Mari Almila is Senior Researcher in Cultural Sociology at the Sapienza University of Rome. She is a sociologist of wine, fashion, and other apparent trivialities. She writes in the fields of cultural, political, global, and historical sociology, and her topics include wine and gender, fashion theory, the materiality of dressed bodies and their environments, and fashion globalization and the history of fashion studies. She loves social theory and (sociology of) wine. She is the author of Veiling in Fashion: Space and the Hijab in Minority Communities (2018). Her edited books include Fashion’s Transnational Inequalities (2023), The Globalization of Wine (2019), The Routledge International Handbook to Veils and Veiling Practices (2017) and The Sage Handbook of Cultural Sociology (2016).
David Inglis is Professor of Sociology at the University of Helsinki. He holds degrees in sociology from the Universities of Cambridge and York. He writes in the areas of cultural sociology, historical sociology, social theory. He has written and edited various books in these areas. He applies knowledge from these areas to issues of globalization, cosmopolitanism, post-colonialism, Eurasia, and the sociological analysis of wine. He has founded two international journals, Cultural Sociology and Dialogues in Sociology, both published by Sage.