Inebriation / Participation / Democratization: On Wine, Fashion and Wine Fashions

The sociologies of cultural participation, fashion and alcohol are not often connected systematically, but conjoining them can indicate wider patterns of socio-cultural change. Cultural participation is not usually modelled through changes in alcohol consumption patterns. Alcohol trends across Europe over the last 30 years involve marked decreases in wine consumption in wine-producing countries, and simultaneous marked consumption increases in non-wine-producing countries. These trends are products and indices of, as well as contributors to, various forms of post-industrial social change. The analysis of which groups drink which alcoholic (or non-alcoholic) drinks over time can reveal a great deal about cultural participation dynamics. This is so in that drinking wine can be understood as participation in cosmopolitan cultures. Moreover, wine may be drunk both at traditional high cultural events enjoyed by older, higher status groups, such as opera, and at trendier events aimed at younger groups possessed of other types of capital. Such issues have not been mapped enough by cultural sociologists, while alcohol researchers tend to focus on alcohol consumption as a social problem among marginalised groups. Opening such a research agenda is the first aim of this paper.

The second aim is to consider the current claim that the trends noted above have involved a “democratization” of wine-drinking in traditionally non-wine-producing countries, such as the Nordics, UK and Ireland, with many more people, especially from lower social backgrounds, participating in wine drinking and in “wine worlds”. We show that such claims about “democratization” - also made about sartorial fashion by fashion sociologists in the late 1990s – are problematic. This is because simultaneous trends, themselves difficult to model adequately, towards wine fashions, often work to de-democratize wine and reinstate consumption hierarchies, through erecting novel symbolic boundaries.