Conceptualizing Oenological Festivals in the New World of Wine. A Regard of Wine Celebrations in Mexico

Abstract

Wine has a status of a global cultural object, whose worldwide dispersion has implied processes of territorial appropriation with various meanings. The approach of the New World of Wine has focused on technological and organizational variations that characterize emerging wine regions, ignoring their sociocultural analysis. Wine festivals are considered to be privileged spaces for analyzing the socio-economic dynamics in these emerging wine production scenarios. To develop a conceptual model, eleven wine festivals in seven wine-growing regions of Mexico were analyzed. This highlights the economic and cultural nature of wine festivals, whose implications are debated between the territorial creative potential and the asymmetric power relations. The popular expression of identities as opposed to the elitist staging locked in the cellars and directed at the middle-class tourist. Wine festivals in Mexico are ambivalent social phenomena where new territorial hegemonies are established, identities are built-in territories undergoing transformation and local resources are reinterpreted in a dialogue between the local and the global.