Selling Wine Country, Hiding Wine Work
Sep 27, 2023 | 5 – 6:30 pm PT
Lecture at UC Berkeley (223 Philosophy Hall) | Speaker: Kathleen A. Brosnan, University of Oklahoma | Co-Sponsor: Institute of European Studies, Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative
Keynote Lecture of the Symposium Migrants, Environmental Knowledge, and Consumer Society
Names matter. In the world of wine, names matter. Marketing depends on the place of production, or the appellation. And in the premium sector, the winery label – often bearing the landowner’s moniker – carries great weight with consumers. In California, vignerons have sold to oenophiles an elaborate mythology of entrepreneurship and presented the Napa Valley as a rural idyll that could be captured in a goblet or a weekend visit. The industry celebrated terroir and a European historicity that belied the contributions of the migrants and others who provided essential labor. From Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth century to Mexican and Mexican American workers in the decades following World War II, vineyard crews toiled under a forced anonymity. Yet it is these laborers who often knew nature most intimately through racially segregated workscapes. They experienced it daily through their senses and with their bodies, often paying a physical price for the wines that consumers enjoyed.
Kathleen Brosnan is the Travis Chair of Modern American History at the University of Oklahoma; member of the Board of Directors of the International Consortium of Environmental History Organizations; founder and board member of the Women’s Environmental History Network; and past president of the American Society for Environmental History. She received her J.D. from the University of Illinois and Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago in 1999. In addition to numerous articles and book chapters, Brosnan has authored or edited seven books in U.S. or comparative environmental history. Her recent books include Mapping Nature Across the Americas (2021); The Greater Plains: Rethinking a Region’s Environmental Histories (2021); City of Lake and Prairie: Chicago’s Environmental History (2020). Brosnan has received grants from the NEH and NSF, among others. Her current book project is an environmental history of the Napa Valley wine industry.