In “Consuming Place: Women, Wine and Imagination,” Janine Aujard examined how women in England and Australia experience wine drinking not just as a gustatory pleasure, but as a medium for engaging with place, memory, identityand imagination. She frames wine consumption as a cultural practice that allows women to “consume” spatial and temporal dimensions. In effect, they are drinking more than wine: They imbibe ideas of place, belonging, and time.
Research Setting
Table of Contents
Aujard draws on ethnographic research conducted in two contrasting settings: the English town of Halifax and the southern suburbs of Adelaide/McLaren Vale in South Australia. Her sample consisted of women participants in both locales whose reflections about wine illuminate how drinking practices are embedded within larger cultural, social, and imaginative frameworks. Through in-depth interviews and participant reflection, Aujard asks:
- How do women interpret their wine consumption as it relates to place, space, and time?
- In what ways does wine drinking overlap with notions of national or regional identity?
- How do memory, imagination, and socially shared imaginaries operate in shaping these experiences?
Aujard weaves in concepts from anthropology, cultural geography, and social memory. She draws on the idea of liminality (inspired by Victor Turner) to argue that wine drinking can produce a kind of liminal pause—a moment of suspension where the boundaries of everyday life become porous. She also invokes the notion of consuming places (after John Urry): the idea that mobility, material culture, and imagination allow people to experience distant places vicariously. Lastly, she draws on the concept of social memory—collective memories embedded in communities—to show how past experiences and shared narratives inflect present drinking practices.
Main Findings and Comparisons
Aujard finds that, despite cultural differences, both English and Australian women use wine as a way to “drink into” place and time. But the modes and emphases differ:
English Women: Armchair Alco-Tourism and Temporal Imagination
- In Halifax, many women described wine as a sort of armchair travel. One participant, Jill, said that sipping an Australian wine (Banrock Station) makes her momentarily imagine she’s in Australia, looking at the Outback. Through the label, origin, and narrative attached to the wine, she mentally “visits” the place.
- This mode is essentially temporal and imaginative: It’s about making a momentary imaginative leap into another place, rather than relating deeply to social memory or lived communal experience.
- Wine thus becomes a tool for constructing imagined journeys or mini escapes within the confines of domestic or local life.
Australian Women: Embedded Memory and Community of Belonging
- In the Adelaide/McLaren Vale setting, women more often draw on regionally rooted memories, social ties, and a sense of belonging. Their wine tasting and experiences are entwined with local wine culture, vineyard landscapes, and shared regional identity.
- Drinking wine in Australia invokes a stronger sense of we-nessof being part of imagined communities that tie them to place and to others. The wine is not simply an object of imagination but is anchored in social memory.
- The past, local histories, and communal narratives tend to frame their consumption. The wine is a tangible link to their region and their identity within it.
Interpretation and Significance
One of Aujard’s key points is that wine drinking is not simply a gendered leisure practice (though it is gendered), nor a neutral or purely individual activity; rather, it is culturally situated and mediated by memory, identity, and spatial imaginaries. In other words, when women drink wine, it means more to them than just drinking wine.
The contrast between the English and Australian experiences shows that cultural context matters: The same act (wine drinking) can carry different functions of imagination or memory depending on the socio-geographic environment. For English participants, wine serves as a portal to other places; for Australian participants, wine grounds them more firmly in their localities and histories.
Aujard argues that these processes have temporal dimensions: Wine drinking enables women to fold past, present, and future into a moment, creating what she calls a liminal experience. In that liminal moment, the boundaries between here and elsewhere, memory and imagination, can shift.
Conclusion
Aujard’s “Consuming place” offers a sophisticated rethinking of wine drinking as more than a sensorial or social act—it is an imaginative, temporal, and spatial practice deeply infused with memory and identity. Women in England and Australia both “drink place,” but the ways they do so diverge: English women often treat wine as a vehicle for imaginative travel, whereas Australian women more commonly anchor their drinking in local histories and collective memory. Taste, memory, and spatial imagination are inseparable. Everyday acts, like pouring a glass of wine, can carry layers of meaning about belonging, distance, and desire.
Further, the results of Aujard’s study, when considered alongside my earlier observations (Mueller, 2023), shed light on why women’s wine collecting holds such complex meaning. If English women use wine as a means of imaginative travel, and Australian women use it as a rooted memory, then collecting wine extends both practices into a more enduring form. Each bottle collected preserves the possibility of “armchair travel” or “communal belonging” in suspended time. Collecting thus amplifies the liminal quality of wine drinking: the anticipation, storage, and eventual opening stretch the experience into months or years.
For women, who historically have been marginalized in the male-dominated world of serious wine collecting, this act becomes doubly significant. Their collections are not only personal archives of taste and memory but also subtle assertions of agency in a cultural space where they are often underrepresented. In this light, women collecting wine are engaging in more than acquisition. They are curating identities, constructing symbolic geographies, and negotiating gendered boundaries. Just as drinking wine allows women to consume place, collecting wine enables them to preserve and display those places, effectively bottling belonging, imagination, and memory into a tangible form.
