The Making of Taste: How Wine Acquires Its Value
Is a great wine made in the vineyard and cellar, or in the minds and institutions that recognise it? This essay traces how personal taste is shaped by social codes, technical choices and the authority of critics, classifications and price — and how that value, in turn, reshapes the taste we believe is our own.
From Bourdieu to Parker, from oak ageing to the 1855 Bordeaux Classification, it reveals the forces that turn a bottle into a symbol, and a price.
Read it to understand what your palate perceives, what prestige constructs, and how to choose wine with greater freedom. Read the essay »
The Latest
Issue 02 — Out 15 September
The Debt You Cannot Refuse
No corporate gift is ever free. Behind the bottle handed to a client, the hamper slipped to a partner, lies the oldest machinery of human life: to give is to bind, to receive is to owe, and every debt, sooner or later, comes due.
A century after Marcel Mauss's The Gift, this issue asks what our professional presents really say about us, and why compliance, far from killing the business gift, has only made it rarer, more deliberate, almost aristocratic.
Five voices — an anthropologist, two sociologists, a historian, and a legal counsel — decipher the silent language the powerful have never stopped speaking. Explore the Issue »
“Bon Vin”: The Art of Raising a Glass, Between Tribute and Caricature
Four men at table, glasses held high, empty bottles rolling across the floor: this popular nineteenth-century print from Épinal seems to sing the pleasures of wine without reserve. Yet behind its bold colours and its air of merriment lies something slyer — a picture that celebrates good fellowship even as it smiles at its excesses, and that reveals a great deal about the manners and roles of a bygone popular France. Discover the image »
Current Favorites
French Table Manners: The Social Codes Behind Every Gesture
From Louis XIV to the business lunch: how French table manners and dining etiquette still encode power, status and belonging — and what every gesture really signals. Read More »
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Ideas, observations and perspectives on wine, French culture, and the unwritten codes that shape social and professional life.