Showing posts with label agriculture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label agriculture. Show all posts

When Champagne Became French: Wine and the Making of a National Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science) Review

When Champagne Became French: Wine and the Making of a National Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science)
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When Champagne Became French: Wine and the Making of a National Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science) ReviewIn light of persistent international debates over whether and how nations should protect geographical indications, I found When Champagne Became French a useful read. Guy tells the story of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century conflicts over the definition of champagne and, in part, the definition of Frenchness as something connected to but distinct from the different parts of France.
The concept of terroir, something like the soul of the soil, that supposedly gives certain foodstuffs their unique qualities was much up for debate during the period, whereas currently the EU and France in particular give unquestioned legal protection to terms like "champagne." Guy points out that, although often understood as a fight between capital and labor, the at-times violent disputes between vine-growers and winemakers in the Champagne region were more complicated than that. Vine-growers in the core areas of the Marne were opposed both to bottlers who wanted to use grapes from other places to make champagne and to fellow vine-growers in those other places who benefited from that practice. Meanwhile, Marne bottlers also argued that the designation champagne should be legally protected, but they wanted to limit the definition to sparkling wine bottled in the area, regardless of the source of grapes.
Guy's story thus highlights champagne as an industrial product - not just because it requires a second processing to add the famous bubbles, but also because its production and consumption were profoundly affected by changes in transportation and modern advertising that helped make champagne the beverage of celebration and of Frenchness. The book is marred by repetitions of phrases, as if a series of journal articles had been simply stitched together, though I don't think these chapters were in fact published elsewhere. Nonetheless, I learned a fair amount about the social construction of terroir, a concept that supposedly represents a natural and immutable connection among an area of land, its inhabitants, and the products they produce.When Champagne Became French: Wine and the Making of a National Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science) OverviewWinner of the Outstanding Manuscript Award from Phi Alpha Theta, this work explains how nationhood emerges by viewing countries as cultural artifacts, a product of "invented traditions." In the case of France, scholars sharply disagree, not only over the nature of French national identity but also over the extent to which diverse and sometimes hostile provincial communities became integrated into the nation. InWhen Champagne Became French: Wine and the Making of a National Identity, Kolleen M. Guy offers a new perspective on this debate by looking at one of the central elements in French national culture-luxury wine-and the rural communities that profited from its production.Focusing on the development of the champagne industry between 1820 and 1920, Guy explores the role of private interests in the creation of national culture and in the nation-building process. Drawing on concepts from social and cultural history, she shows how champagne helped fuel the revolution in consumption as social groups searched for new ways to develop cohesion and to establish status. By the end of the nineteenth century, Guy concludes, the champagne-producing provinces in the department of Marne had developed a rhetoric of French identity that promoted its own marketing success as national. This ability to mask local interests as national concerns convinced government officials of the need, at both national and international levels, to protect champagne as a French patrimony.

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Corkscrewed: Adventures in the New French Wine Country (At Table) Review

Corkscrewed: Adventures in the New French Wine Country (At Table)
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Corkscrewed: Adventures in the New French Wine Country (At Table) ReviewWhen I lived in Napa, I saw the sad, inevitable industrial takeover of the wine community. Now the moneymen mass produce thousands of acres of mediocre cabernet or zinfandel in the Central Valley and slap a label with the word "Napa" on it to inflate the price. They doctor their mediocrity with wood chips and flavored yeasts. Some regions of France are losing their integrity to this bottom feeding mentality. Robert Camuto, like Kermit Lynch and director Jonathan Nossiter (Mondovino), seeks out the people who are wrestling the soul of wine away from the people and places that would sell it to the highest bidder. Corkscrewed hits it on the head with his uneasiness at the rote tasting sessions at Vinexpo. From there he takes us with him on his voyages of discovery, not as an expert but as a wine lover. He conjures images of the real, the genuine, the natural and the heartfelt in each of his visits to various wine regions in France. His comical, bacchus-possessed visit to the most over-the-top wine event in the world, the auction at les Hospices de Beaune, makes you realize that the Burgundians have somehow maintained their integrity in spite of the world wide clamor for pinot noir. His journey with the peasant (et fier d'etre!) in the ArdĂȘche and that region's rediscovery of chatus, provides hope. The stories and survival of these intense, impassioned winemakers are essential for any wine lover.Corkscrewed: Adventures in the New French Wine Country (At Table) OverviewRobert V. Camuto's interest in wine turned into a passion when he moved to France and began digging into local soils and cellars. Corkscrewed recounts Camuto's journey through France s myriad regions and how the journey brought about a profound change in everything he believed about wine.The world of great wines was once dominated by great Bordeaux chateaux. As those chateaux were bought up by moguls and international corporations, the heart of French winemaking moved into the realm of small producers, whose wines reflect the stunning diversity of regional environment, soil, and culture terroir. In this book we follow Camuto across France as he works harvesting grapes in Alsace, learns about wine and bombs in Corsica, and eats and drinks his way through the world s greatest bacchanalia in Burgundy. Along the route he discovers a new generation of winemakers who have rejected chemicals, additives, and technologically altered wines. His book charts an odyssey into this new world of French wine, a world of biodynamic winegrowing, herbal treatments, lunar cycles, and grape varieties long ago dismissed as difficult. Acelebration of the diversity that makes French wine more than a mere commodity, Camuto s work is a delightful look beyond the supermarket to the various flavors offered by the true vintners of France. (20070824)

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French Beans and Food Scares: Culture and Commerce in an Anxious Age Review

French Beans and Food Scares: Culture and Commerce in an Anxious Age
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French Beans and Food Scares: Culture and Commerce in an Anxious Age ReviewThis book was a pleasure to read. Part of the enjoyment derived from the delightful writing style which is rare in academic books explaining complex topics like this. However, a great deal of the pleasure came from the author's comprehensive research, including extensive interviews, and her extremely sophisticated analysis. Among other things, she explores the historical bases of two contemporary global networks trading in highly perishable vegetables and clearly demonstrates the continued influence of colonial ties in the contemporary links between African vegetable growers and European retailers. This is something often mentioned but rarely demonstrated in such convincing detail as it is here. I was also particular impressed with the author's detailed exploration of the contemporary social and cultural factors (including media influence) that have produced quite different fresh vegetable retailing behavior in France and U.K. She shows how this, in turn, contributes to different sets of relationships between growers, middlemen and retailers and among African growers themselves. It is one of the most interesting books I have read to date in the area of global horticultural chains and networks and establishes a very high standard against which to measure similar publications. Anyone interested in globalization, food studies, horticultural production in Africa, contemporary European food retailing and supermarket chains, would learn a great deal from this book.
French Beans and Food Scares: Culture and Commerce in an Anxious Age OverviewFrom mad cows to McDonaldization to genetically modified maize, European food scares and controversies at the turn of the millennium provoked anxieties about the perils hidden in an increasingly industrialized, internationalized food supply.These food fears have cast a shadow as long as Africa, where farmers struggle to meet European demand for the certifiably clean green bean.But the trade in fresh foods between Africa and Europe is hardly uniform. Britain and France still do business mostly with their former colonies, in ways that differ as dramatically as their national cuisines.The British buy their "baby veg" from industrial-scale farms, pre-packaged and pre-trimmed; the French, meanwhile, prefer their green beans naked, and produced by peasants. Managers and technologists coordinate the baby veg trade between Anglophone Africa and Britain, whereas an assortment of commercants and self-styled agro-entrepreneurs run the French bean trade. Globalization, then, has not erased cultural difference in the world of food and trade, but instead has stretched it to a transnational scale.French Beans and Food Scares explores the cultural economies of two "non-traditional" commodity trades between Africa and Europe--one anglophone, the other francophone--in order to show not only why they differ but also how both have felt the fall-out of the wealthy world's food scares. In a voyage that begins in the mid-19th century and ends in the early 21st, passing by way of Paris, London, Burkina Faso and Zambia, French Beans and Food Scares illuminates the daily work of exporters, importers and other invisible intermediaries in the global fresh food economy. These intermediaries' accounts provide a unique perspective on the practical and ethical challenges of globalized food trading in an anxious age.They also show how postcolonial ties shape not only different societies' geographies of food supply, but also their very ideas about what makes food good.

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