Curating the Cellar: Women, Wine, and the Art of Collecting

"In "Consuming Place: Women, Wine and Imagination," Janine Aujard examined how women in England and Australia experience wine drinking not just as a gustatory pleasure, but as a medium for engaging with place, memory, identity, and imagination. She frames wine consumption as a cultural practice that allows women to "consume" spatial and temporal dimensions. In effect, they are drinking more than wine: They imbibe ideas of place, belonging, and time."

"Aujard draws on ethnographic research conducted in two contrasting settings: the English town of Halifax and the southern suburbs of Adelaide/McLaren Vale in South Australia. Her sample consisted of women participants in both locales whose reflections about wine illuminate how drinking practices are embedded within larger cultural, social, and imaginative frameworks. Through in-depth interviews and participant reflection, Aujard asks: How do women interpret their wine consumption as it relates to place, space, and time?"

Ethnographic work in Halifax, England and the southern suburbs of Adelaide/McLaren Vale, South Australia examined women’s wine practices and meanings. Women interpreted wine drinking as engagement with place, memory, identity, and imagination rather than merely gustatory pleasure. English women often used wine as imaginative travel, linking tastes to distant landscapes; Australian women used wine as rooted memory tied to local terroir and domestic histories. Wine consumption created liminal pauses that made everyday boundaries porous and allowed reflection. Drinking practices were embedded in cultural, social, and imaginative frameworks, intersecting with national and regional identities and practices of collecting and remembering.

Read at Psychology Today