Tasting Wine: A Learning Experience

Abstract

This paper describes a field trip by senior undergraduate anthropology students to a local winery, where they participated in a wine-tasting class with winery staff. In response to explicit hints from a wine-tasting facilitator, and more subtle cues from the cultural capital embedded in their surroundings and the winery staff, the students expressed a shift in their perception of the wines as they learned to taste them in a way that was socially validated. In this way the students learned, as embodied knowledge, how their physical senses were influenced by their cultural surroundings. We describe the student excursion, and particularly their experiences, and we consider the trend in experiential learning literature to focus on the reflection stage in the constructivist cycle of experience, reflection, abstraction, and testing. While recognising the pedagogic value of reflection and rule extrapolation, we seek to characterise the learning that occurs “in the moment.”