Professor Rod Phillips‘s latest book is Wine: A Social and Cultural History of the Drink that Changed our Lives. It was published in the U.K. at the end of March in the ‘Classic Wine Library’ of Oxford-based Infinite Ideas Publishers.
This is a new approach to the history of wine. Instead of writing a chronological history (which he has already done) Rod has written a history of wine from eight thematic perspectives: wine and health, wine and religion, wine and gender, wine and landscape, wine and words, wine and war, wine and food, and wine and crime.
In the chapter on wine and health, for example, he examines the way that, for thousands of years, physicians credited wine with therapeutic qualities that could cure conditions as varied as epilepsy, earache, and asthma. In the chapter on wine and landscape, he looks at the way viticulture has altered landscapes and how landscapes were folded back into wine in the idea of terroir, the effects of growing conditions on wine. In the chapter on wine and gender he looks at long-term differences between women and men in terms of wine consumption, male attitudes toward women’s drinking, and the twentieth century habit of some wine writers to refer to some wine styles as ‘masculine’ and others as ‘feminine’.
Rod is currently writing a history of Burgundy (the wine and the place) and a guide to the wines of South-west France.