Professor Rod Phillips will give his annual public lecture on wine and art at the Timken Museum of Art in San Diego, California, on 18 August. He’s been giving a lecture there in August since 2019, with time off for covid.
The Timken is a private, free-admission gallery in Balboa Park that houses an impressive collection of art from many periods and places. A number of works are from the period of the European Masters (about 1300-1800), and this is the period that Rod focuses on.
In this year’s talk, ‘The Art of Drinking Wine’, Rod looks at what art can tell us about the etiquette of wine drinking in the early modern period. Where and when was it proper to drink wine – at meals, in taverns, for breakfast, at banquets? Who do you drink wine with, and was solitary drinking frowned on? How much should you drink? What types of wine were appropriate for what sorts of people? Were there particular glasses you should drink wine from? The rules of wine-drinking etiquette were finely tuned by class and gender.
Rod’s talk is preceded by a reception and followed by a wine tasting that he leads.
Professor Phillips is a historian of wine, and he teaches a course on the history of alcohol at Carleton.
Timken Museum: https://www.timkenmuseum.org/
The lecture: https://www.timkenmuseum.org/calendar/event/wine-masters-the-art-of-drinking-wine/