Summer Course Spotlight- Special Topics in Gastronomy: The Language of Wine

In this class, students will learn how language makes the world and all the people in it. We will look at wine talk (also called oinoglossia, from the Greek) to understand how the language we use creates both the wine and the talker as social agents. Popular culture represents the way people talk about wine as weird: uptight, obsessive, as if people are making these flavors up! But for people deep in the wine world, these ways of talking about wine are a key part of the enjoyment, and the business, of wine, and being able to talk about wine the ‘right’ way has serious social stakes. In this course, we will learn about what makes Wine Talk distinctive from other ways of talking, the social implications of being able to speak this way, and why it matters to the field of food studies.

This course is in the discipline of Linguistic Anthropology, and we will be doing plenty of fieldwork together! We will, as a class and on our own, find and analyze examples of people talking about wine in many different ways. Students will learn to compose transcripts, closely read samples of natural language, and conduct linguistic anthropological fieldwork to study language in social life. We will go on field trips together to find and analyze wine talk ‘in the wild’ and students will get to do some of their own fieldwork in the wine worlds they have access to or are most curious about. We will tackle robust theories of language together, with plenty of support and camaraderie, and students will leave this class with a strong sense of accomplishment in having learned an introduction to the major themes, theories, and research methods of linguistic anthropology. We will have units on the prestige of wine talk, winemaking, the natural wine world, and more.

Anyone who is curious about language, how cultural worlds are constructed, and the social life of wine will enjoy this class. Students need no prior experience with linguistic anthropology or wine talk, and you do not need to consume any wine to participate in or enjoy the course. If you are worried that you don’t know how to talk about wine the ‘right way,’ that makes you an excellent outside observer to the phenomenon and your insights will be critical to the class! Join us!