The History of Rioja Wine: Tradition and Invention.

Abstract

shopping venues. Accessible empire wines suited these trends. In this milieu, Australian producers, for example, demonstrated a self-confidence grounded in their embrace of new methods and in their supposed entrepreneurship and superiority over native Australians, ignoring the longer history of dispossession and state sponsorship. “They certainly would not best the French by trying to sell tradition, but they could portray their industry as clean, modern, and sophisticated” (223). By the 1990s, Australian wines became favorites with a broader swathe of British consumers, while South Africa – having ended apartheid – and New Zealand – having left behind an influential temperance movement – increasingly made their way into British supermarkets. Given this book’s coverage of three colonies (plus a single chapter discussing wine in India, Cyprus, Malta, and Canada), it is not surprising that the author does not bore down on certain production details. For example, there is no sense of the amount of acreage cultivated for wine, the volume of exports, or the challenges of farming grapes in drier climates. Moreover, while Regan-Lefebvre briefly discusses these nations’ origins under settler colonialism in chapter one and touches on issues surrounding racialized labor, she does little more to analyze the dispossession of Indigenous peoples or to contemplate the ongoing processes of settler colonialism and their relation to the wine industry. Imperial Wine offers graceful prose and deep archival research, although the author’s trip to South African archives was stymied by the pandemic. The bibliography identifies archives in Australia, Canada, and the United States, but it also reveals that Regan-Lefebvre draws most extensively on resources in the United Kingdom, reflecting her effort to put the empire and its intersecting civilizing and capitalist missions at the forefront. In doing so, she reminds us of how historical phenomena developed across the intersecting planes of the local, the national, and the global. Using a single commodity, Imperial Wine effectively conveys the profound, often unexpected power of imperial trade to transform the metropole and colony alike.