Untangling politics and wine
Nikita Malhotra
September 20, 2024
“Once you reach a certain detailed awareness of everyday life, absence of wine is shocking, like something exotic.” ~ Roland Barthes
Election day is fast approaching - this means there is a barrage of memes featuring cute puppies in pots with a scoop of mirepoix being dumped on their confused heads and references to the iconic question of whether or not you think you just fell out of a coconut tree? The media is unrelenting and for many of us a glass of wine offers a refuge from this chaotic onslaught.
But politics pierces and punctuates spaces that we would rather categorize as unpolitical. As wine lovers, the debate on tariffs seems to be encroaching on a safe space, a space that seemed safe of being determined by the whims and tantrums of politicians. America’s tenuous relationship with wine in the 20th century plays a large role in our contemporary understanding. The quote from Barthes is from his essay ‘Wine and Milk,’ a unique essay analyzing the cultural symbolic nature of wine to French identity. Milk, on the opposing side of this dichotomy, represents the American identity. This essay was written in the 1950’s, a time where the milkman would, I imagine, still drop off bottles of milk at your doorstep.
Mapping America’s history with wine is to witness many swerves and curves. We admire Thomas Jefferson’s cosmopolitan taste and impressive cellar and are fascinated that LBJ only served American wine at the White House. We know that Trump doesn’t drink any alcohol, a decision made due to his brother’s issues with addiction. Biden also doesn’t drink. But Kamala Harris is a wine enthusiast and was a member of the Congressional Wine Caucus. In this century we have only had one president who drank alcohol, and that was Obama. Wine has certainly presented itself in moments of history in our country, but it will never be as symbolic as it is for the French. In France, wine is political in a way because it is part of what it means to be French. In America about one third of the population doesn’t really drink. I don’t think milk has the same symbolic relationship to Americans as it once did, and I can’t imagine one beverage being representative of America.
In the coming days, even the most mundane things in our lives will have the potential to become political. But maybe we should understand wine in this political world. Barthes wrote about wine in a terms of capitalism as well in his essay, exploring the layers of meaning that it has for France. This ties into a basic understanding of what a commodity is in Marxist terms and how in turn that can be fetishized. But there is also something silly about how various factions have used wine as a means of defining their world views. We hear things like liberals drink natural wine and conservatives drink Bordeaux, and it might not be as transparent as that, but when you begin looking at the world in this political way, everything is coded a certain way to make sense of value. Simply put, I will always ascribe value to wine in a capitalistic sense whether intentionally or not. Imagine if I try to sell you a ‘cool’ and ‘hip’ wine from a lesser-known region, I would focus on farming practices and talk about egalitarian sensibilities and in doing so you would find more value to the wine.
Maybe I read too much Fukuyama - but my love of wine is also very much attached to my understanding of free market capitalism. I live in New York City and have access to great wine from around the world. Supply and demand is expressed by the desires of people, by buyers and sellers. What does it mean when the government or an external authority intervenes? And is this what is at stake when we look at policies that favor a regulated market?
More and more importers, hospitality professionals, winemakers and friends are voicing their concern for what proposed policies will mean for their future lives. I might not be French, but my identity is quite wrapped up in wine and so my political mode of being is very much entangled by the wine world. The point I want to make is that although we like to adhere to the notion that some things, like the wine world, should remain neutral in terms of politics, sometimes it’s ok to discuss policies and debate with one another because of how much it can affect our so called neutral world.
