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In 1967, the sales of table wines surpassed those of dessert wines for the first time since the repeal of prohibition in 1933 in the United States. This talk explores how and why this change—what the wine journalist Leon Adams called the “wine revolution”—happened by analyzing the creation of a wine category as a cultural product. Regulation, industry structure, organizational structure, technology, and markets both constrained and promoted the constitution of a wine category (table and dessert wines) and its dissemination. These categories serve not simply to classify different products but also to signify one’s taste. The table wine category can be better understood as distinguishing between cultures of taste rather than between two types of wine. In this regard, the “wine revolution” was semiotic as well as sensorial transformation in drinking culture.

 

Ai Hisano is an associate professor at the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies at the University of Tokyo. Before moving to Tokyo in 2021, she served as a Newcomen Postdoctoral Fellow in Business History at Harvard Business School (2016–17) and taught at Kyoto University (2017–2021). She received a BA and MA in American Studies from the University of Tokyo and a PhD in History from the University of Delaware. Her publications include Visualizing Taste: How Business Changed the Look of What You Eat (Harvard University Press, 2019), which won the 2020 Hagley Prize in Business History (Business History Conference) and the 2020 Shimizu Hiroshi Book Award (Japanese Association for American Studies). Hisano’s research interests include business history, the history of capitalism, the history of technology, and the history of the senses.

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*Please contact Jeff Jenkins (jjenkins8@ucmerced.edu) for Zoom link.
**Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, most of our speakers will be joining us virtually via Zoom. If they do decide to visit in person, an announcement will be made closer to their visit with Zoom link, and social distancing guidelines will be followed, including the use of masks for those in attendance.

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