Abstract
This research examines how provenance – where a product was produced, by whom, how and when – features in the work of cultural intermediaries in the Australian premium wine market, at two different stages in the career of a wine. First, evaluations of provenance attributes (in terms of sincerity, tradition and transparency) serve as filters through which wine promoters identify market-worthy wines; second, those attributes are strategically deployed to frame the wine as a worthy choice for consumers (focusing on the use of the winemaker as a framing device). The article offers a distinctive account of the qualification of wine, and makes the case for a cultural economic conceptualization of provenance as a negotiated, accomplished quality. In foregrounding wine promoters’ emotional attachments to provenance attributes of wines they choose to promote, the research highlights the affective dimensions of markets, which are made, in part, through the consuming passions of cultural intermediaries.
Highlights
Quality claims based on ‘where things come from’ are found across a range of categories of consumer products
The distinctiveness of wine promoters lies in their ability to extract economic value from their tastes, converting such dispositions into value-adding devices. Cultural intermediaries use their own tastes and experiences in making the cultural and economic calculations involved in bringing goods to the marketplace
Wine promoters mediate between economy and culture when, for example, they: use cultural knowledge as a tool to achieve economic ends; economic logic is used to achieve cultural agendas; economic ends are embedded in cultural activities (e.g. touristic visits to wineries provide sommeliers with ammunition to use inselling to the end consumer); and cultural knowledge is embedded in economic calculations
Summary
Quality claims based on ‘where things come from’ are found across a range of categories of consumer products. Working from a cultural economy perspective (Amin and Thrift 2004; du Gay and Pryke 2002), the article explores how notions of provenance and authenticity inform the ways in which wine promoters identify products to bring to market and, in turn, frame them so as to add value.
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