Consuming place: Women, wine and imagination

Abstract

This paper examines wine drinking among English and Australian women to discover and analyse the connection between their consumption of wine and their experiences, thoughts and imaginings. Comparing the experiences of women from the English town of Halifax with women from the southern suburbs of Adelaide and McLaren Vale (South Australia), I show how imbibing wine enables both groups of women to consume place, space and time, thus extending a liminal experience. Importantly, both groups of women engage with notions of national or regional identity. However, whereas English women typically experience wine drinking as a temporal engagement of social imagination involving a form of armchair alco-tourism, Australian women mostly engage their social memory, and experience wine drinking as embedded within imagined communities of belonging. As such, this study demonstrates that wine drinking is not just gendered, but a complex, culturally situated practice and experience.