Constructing the Sociology (or Sociologies) of Wine

Sociology has by and large ceded wine industries, worlds and cultures to other disciplines. But even among those, there is little evidence of a systematic social science of wine in all its various dimensions. Specialists from each discipline focus on those aspects of wine that one would expect them to focus on. It is not going too far to claim that there is no such thing as a field called the sociology of wine today, let alone a systematically and coherently organised field that could be termed the social science of wine more broadly. This is particularly strange given the importance and significance of wine and wine-related phenomena across the world at the present time. This special issue aims at constructing a sociology of wine, just as, for example, a sociology of arts and artists had to be self-consciously constructed thirty years ago and more.