Wine Studies: Preliminary Considerations on Their Substantive Content and Symbolic Significance

Abstract

Wine can be considered not just a drink, but also a separate galaxy of subject areas, building bridges to non-trivial phenomena that are of interest to the social, behavioral, and human sciences. Despite the fact that for certain disciplines, wine can take the form of a convenient and useful attribute of the object being studied (for example, for experimental psychology, wine can act as a perceptually complex multisensory stimulus; for history and geography, a cultural and economic artifact of the household of a particular people; for political science, an instrument for the development of empires, colonization, and mobilization of interests; for sociology, a phenomenon that can mark belonging to a certain social category or push for the realization of a trust claim, etc.), the very fact of the interdisciplinary “involvement” of wine, as well as the existence of internal wine mythologemes, allows us to make it an independent complex subject. Immersion in this subject can not only clarify the constituent elements of wine and wine attributes but also provide an additional perspective for deriving heuristics regarding the study of neighboring phenomena.