PRESENTERS
IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER
KATHLEEN A. BROSNAN
Department of History, the University of Oklahoma
Title of Presentation:
“Preserving Winescapes Amidst North America’s Urban Sprawl”
About:
Kathleen A. Brosnan is the Travis Chair of Modern American History at the University of Oklahoma and a past president of the American Society for Environmental History. She is the author, editor, or co-editor of seven books, including most recently City of Lake and Prairie: Chicago’s Environmental History (Pittsburgh, 2020); The Greater Plains: Rethinking a Region’s Environmental Histories (Nebraska, 2021); and Mapping Nature Across the Americas (Chicago, 2021). Brosnan is currently writing an environmental history of the Napa wine industry.
Abstract:
In 1968 before achieving international renown, Napa County created an agricultural preserve, whose maintenance required a persistent county government and a committed populace choosing agriculture and open space often over personal economic interests. It was later a model for those who hoped to sustain grape production in Ontario’s Niagara Peninsula whose viticultural reputation improved even as Toronto expanded its reach. In 2005, Ontario’s government included the peninsula in a larger greenbelt. Napa and Ontario’s laws were both progressive and conservative, reflecting modern ethos celebrating environment and lifestyle while ensconced in traditional images of the ‘rural idyll’. Challenges to sustainability continue. Napa’s preserve covers less ground, but with a surprising loss of biodiversity due to viticultural expansion. The Niagara region was industrialized with a much larger population, and faced a more competitive global wine market at inception. Land prices soared and competing visions emerged over the value of wine tourism for sustainability.
JACK CECILLON
History Department, Glendon College
Title of Presentation:
“The Rise and Fall of an Early Ontario Winery”
About:
Jack Cecillon is a long time secondary school history teacher in Pickering Ontario. He received his doctoral degree in Canadian history from York University in 2008. He has authored various journal articles and published three history texts. Cecillon co-authored Emerging Loyalties and Creating Canada, two history texts for secondary school students in 2006 and 2014. In 2013, he published Prayers, Petitions and Protests: The Catholic Church and the Ontario Schools Crisis, 1910-1927 based on his doctoral studies. Presently, he is studying French immigration to the Windsor Border Region in the late 19th century and its impact on the area’s fledgling wine industry. Cecillon also teaches at the Glendon College Campus of York University
Abstract:
In 1874, immigrant Théodule Girardot welcomed two French families to his home in Sandwich, Ontario. Fleeing the devastation of the Franche-Comté after the Franco-Prussian War, these families introduced grape-growing and winemaking traditions to southwestern Ontario. In the 1880s, they recruited a small contingent of skilled vineyard workers from France to accomplish their mission. After the brief heyday of amateur vintners on the Detroit River, the Robinet family emerged as the predominant producer. Jules Robinet’s name became synonymous with local wine, and for more than 40 years, he served as a focal point for winemakers, bootleggers and the French immigrant community alike. Despite surviving an economic depression, an agricultural crisis and Prohibition, a series of factors cut short Robinet’s winemaking legacy when other wineries survived. What factors finally led to the downfall of Robinet’s winery?”
CHELSEA DAVIS
Visiting Assistant Professor in World History and Africa, Colby College
Title of Presentation:
“All that Glitters is Wine? Viticultural Capitalists and the Creation of Britain’s Colonial Wine Industry.”
About:
Chelsea Davis is a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. She successfully defended her doctoral dissertation, “Cultivating Imperial Networks: Britain’s Colonial Wine Production at the Cape of Good Hope and South Australia, 1834-1910” at The George Washington University in March 2021. Her current book project, entitled, The Empire and the Aphid: Knowledge and Viticultural Sciences in the Age of Phylloxera, 1860-1910, examines colonial responses to the emergence of an environmental crisis, including the navigation of established imperial networks and negotiation of practical and scientific knowledge. Her general research interests include colonial history, labor history, and the history of science and the environment.
Abstract:
The mineral revolutions of the 19th century served as a turning point in the colonial wine industries of South Australia and the Cape Colony. The discovery of gold and diamonds not only facilitated early efforts of industrialization, but equally created a class of settler colonialists who would reinvest their wealth into wine. This paper will examine two case studies of who I call ‘viticultural capitalists’, men who consolidated the processes of production of colonial wine in the British Empire. These white settlers cultivated a space for corporate expansion, political ‘say’ in management of each colony, and access to growing social and economic networks, which they used to import vines, technologies, ideas, and even people. Such privileges served to isolate small winegrowers and exploit viticultural laborers, especially individuals of color. These viticultural capitalists and the creation of large-scale wine companies sought to transform wine into a colonial commodity for the empire.
MARIE-JOËLLE DUCHESNE
History Department, Université du Québec à Montréal
Title of Presentation:
“The Fertile Pairing of Wine and Québec: A Cultural History of the Early Commercial Mandate of the Société des alcools du Québec (1971-1986)”
About:
Marie-Joëlle Duchesne is currently finishing her masters in history at Université du Québec à Montréal. Since completing her bachelor in art history and film studies at Concordia University in 2011, she has pursued a career in the wine industry as a sommelier and currently works at a wine agency in Montreal. Her return to the academic world stems from an interest in better understanding Quebec’s peculiar relationship with wine.
Abstract:
This presentation traces the early history of the Société des alcools du Québec (SAQ) and discusses how wine has been an object of particular interest for the public corporation. Wine, rather than spirits, became the perfect vehicle for promoting a modern way of drinking alcohol targeted to a new generation of consumers. This rational, moderate and distinguished way of consuming an alcoholic beverage reconciled the conundrum of profit-making whilst keeping the overall alcohol consumption “reasonable”. Through the democratization of wine’s consumption in the seventies, the beverage also became further associated with Quebec’s French roots. With the first election win of the Parti québécois in 1976, wine continued its ascent, as it not only became a subject of economic recovery and object of industrial policy, but also fueled bilateral relations between Quebec and France.
This presentation aims to add new insight into the predominantly socioeconomic discussion that has prevailed in research on SAQ as a public corporation. By focusing on the object of wine as a cultural and economic commodity, traversed by transnational interests, this research wishes to offer a different history of the Société des alcools du Québec.
PATRICE DUTIL
Department of Politics and Public Administration, Ryerson University
Title of Presentation:
The 1988 “Niagara Accord” in Perspective: The Ontario Wine Industry in Four Historical Phases
About:
Patrice Dutil is Professor of Politics and Public Administration at Ryerson University and Senior Fellow in the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary History at the University of Toronto. He is the author, co-author and editor of ten books and of dozens of scholarly articles that cover various aspects of political and administrative leadership, public policy and Canadian History.
Abstract:
In 1968 before achieving international renown, Napa County created an agricultural preserve, whose maintenance required a persistent county government and a committed populace choosing agriculture and open space often over personal economic interests. It was later a model for those who hoped to sustain grape production in Ontario’s Niagara Peninsula whose viticultural reputation improved even as Toronto expanded its reach. In 2005, Ontario’s government included the peninsula in a larger greenbelt. Napa and Ontario’s laws were both progressive and conservative, reflecting modern ethos celebrating environment and lifestyle while ensconced in traditional images of the ‘rural idyll’. Challenges to sustainability continue. Napa’s preserve covers less ground, but with a surprising loss of biodiversity due to viticultural expansion. The Niagara region was industrialized with a much larger population, and faced a more competitive global wine market at inception. Land prices soared and competing visions emerged over the value of wine tourism for sustainability.
ANNICK FOUCRIER
Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
Title of Presentation:
"The contribution of French traders and migrants to California viticulture"
About:
Annick Foucrier is Professor Emerita at the Sorbonne (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) and former director of the Centre for Research in North American History (CRHNA, University Paris 1). She has published numerous articles about the French in California, the French and French-speaking migrants in the United States, the North American West, the Pacific World, the history of California, and international migrations. Her publications include Le rêve californien. Migrants français sur la côte Pacifique, XVIIIe-XXe siècles, (Belin, 1999); À travers l’Ouest nord-américain : L’expédition d’exploration dirigée par Meriwether Lewis et William Clark, 1803-1806 (Besançon, Éditions La Lanterne Magique, 2018). She has edited : The French and the Pacific World, 17th-19th centuries: Explorations, Migrations and Cultural Exchanges (Ashgate, 2005)
Abstract:
Spanish missionaries introduced wine making in California. But the vines were of an inferior quality and tasted too sweet. At the beginning of the 19th century, French wines reached the coasts of California through transoceanic trade. Soon after, French migrants in search of opportunities became aware of the local possibilities. They brought French cuttings and methods. At the time of the Gold Rush, many more arrived and contributed to the spreading of numerous vineyards in California. At the end of the 19th century, California viticulture came of age, and strove to outsmart its French model with a more “scientific” approach. Stopped at the time of prohibition, this rivalry culminated with the well-advertised “judgment of Paris” in 1976. The California wine industry took place among the best and attracted French investors who signed joint ventures with California producers.
ERICA HANNICKEL
Department of History, Northland College
Title of Presentation:
“George Engelmann, 19th-century North American Grapes, and Europe’s Battle with Phylloxera: A Reappraisal”
About:
Erica Hannickel is a professor of environmental history and author of Orchid Muse: The Story of an Obsession in Fifteen Flowers (Norton, forthcoming 2022). Other publications include Empire of Vines: Wine Culture in America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), “Fretting Over Federalism: Reexamining Allegorical Indian Architecture in William Bartram’s Travels” ISLE 20:1 (Winter 2013), “Cultivation and Control: Grape Growing as Expansion in Nineteenth-Century United States and Australia”, Comparative American Studies 8:4 (December 2010), and “A Fortune in Fruit: Nicholas Longworth and Grape Speculation in Antebellum Ohio” American Studies 51:1/2 (Spring/Summer 2010).
Abstract:
Although professionally better known for his work on North American cactus, in the wine world, George Engelmann (1809-1884) is popularly thought to have “saved” France and Europe more broadly in the 1870s from phylloxera by suggesting that Vitis vinifera vines be grafted onto American rootstock. This essay offers a reappraisal of the botanist’s place in the international wine industry and grape science, as well as the phylloxera crises’ reciprocal influence upon his wider career. Engelmann’s work on grapes from his adopted home of St. Louis—within the regional, scientific, and political worlds in which he travelled—illustrates that far from acting alone, he served as the hub of a wide wheel of international botanical inquiry. Engelmann was one of at least a half-dozen settler-colonial immigrants from western Europe to land in the U.S. Midwest and shape international winegrowing in the late 19th century.
SHANA KLEIN
School of Art, Kent State University
Title of Presentation:
“Making an American Rhineland in California: The Politics of Grapes, Race, and Westward Settlement”
About:
Shana Klein is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Kent State University. She holds a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of New Mexico, where she completed the dissertation—and now book—“The Fruits of Empire: Art, Food, and the Politics of Race in the Age of American Expansion.” This book examines food in paintings, advertisements and cookbooks to understand how food imagery was a platform for artists and viewers to discuss heated debates about race and citizenship. Klein has been awarded several fellowships for her research at institutions such as the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Henry Luce Foundation, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, among others. She has published research in journals such as American Art and Food and History. Klein’s research and courses bring together art and social justice.
Abstract:
The essay studies grape imagery during the rise of the California grape industry in late-nineteenth century United States. Depictions of grapes in paintings, prints, and world’s fair exhibits celebrated the economic potential of California grapes, while also claiming the West and its landscape for white-American development. Images of Mexican and Asian grape pickers, on the other hand, were not so celebratory; they sparked controversy among viewers who believed that these communities were damaging California’s grapevines and spoiling the purity of America’s fruit lands. This essay examines the material culture of the California grape and how visual depictions of grapes triggered debates over the racial consequences of westward settlement.
JULIE MCINTYRE
School of Humanities and Social Science (History), The University of Newcastle, Australia
Title of Presentation:
“Decolonising wine: First peoples’ connections with grapes and their products”
About:
Senior Lecturer at the School of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Newcastle, Julie McIntyre is one of the leading scholars on wine culture and production. Her research on agriculture, science and environments focuses on how the growing, making, selling, drinking and export of Australian grape wine is a window to economic development, changing identities and landscapes. These inquiries cross into histories of alcohol production, science, capitalism, drinking cultures and tourism in her award-winning book entitled Hunter Wine: A History (with John Germov, NewSouth, 2018). Her current Fulbright Senior Scholarship funded project is on the wine industry in the U.S. and Australia by focusing on scientific exchange from 1955 to 1977.
Abstract:
This paper applies decolonial methods to interpreting wine history since the 1400s. The historical record rarely contains evidence of Indigenous voices and know-how connected with winegrowing even though they commonly laboured in settler wine industries on their ancestral lands. My focus is therefore on what is known of the identity of Indigenous peoples whose land and labour contributed to the emergence and continuity of settler wine production. Decolonising winegrape cultivation and winemaking also requires nuancing of first peoples’ relationship with wine and other grape production to counter the dominant colonial representation of Indigenous peoples as prone to alcohol addiction.
JENNIFER REGAN-LEFEBVRE
Department of History, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut
Title of Presentation:
“British Imperial Viticulture and Settler Colonialism: Should Wine History Have a Postcolonial Future?”
About:
Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre is an Associate Professor of History at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut and an historian of Britain, Ireland, and the British Empire. She is currently working on a book on the history of wine production in former British colonies. Entitled Imperial Wine: The British Empire and the Making of Wine's New World, the book will be published by University of California Press in 2021. Her work combines political, economic, and cultural approaches, and puts wine history in dialogue with colonial history. For her scholarship and educational impact, she was named one of the "Future 50" of the global wine industry by the Wine and Spirits Education Trust and the International Wine and Spirits Competition in 2019.
Abstract:
Until recently, wine history was largely the preserve of wine enthusiasts, whose delight in the historical growth of viticulture ignored the power dynamics that fostered viticulture in the New World. As wine history emerges as rigorous field of academic study, this paper examines the theoretical positions and commitments historians might take in analyzing settler colonialism and viticulture in the British world. I will begin with an overview of the major historiographical approaches to wine history, noting the general absence of discussions of imperialism and colonialism. I will then present my findings on the encouragement that South African and Australian settler winemakers received from British and colonial governments. I will use the Burgoyne company, the major British importer of Australian and South African wine from the 1870s through the 1950s, as a case study, and compare several theoretical approaches to analyzing its exploits in view of the official sanction for colonial viticulture.
MIKAEL PIERRE
University of Newcastle, Australia/ Bordeaux Montaigne University, France
Title of Presentation:
“A Theoretical Wine Model: Introducing and Adapting French Wine Literature into Colonial Australia”
About:
Mikael Pierre holds a PhD in History from the University of Newcastle, Australia, and the Bordeaux Montaigne University, France. He focuses his research on wine history and transnational connections. He has published several works on this matter, and recently co-edited Wine, Networks and Scales (2021) with S. Lachaud, C. Marache and J. McIntyre.
Abstract:
British winegrowers in Australia were met early on with the difficulty of acquiring knowledge and skills to develop the wine industry in their colonies. They turned their attention to France to obtain such expertise, noticeably by reading and translating French authors. Although some of them were considered experts in their field, this process quickly questioned the suitability of their instructions in a very distant country. The French theoretical model was thus progressively challenged by empirical knowledge. This topic raises the question of the impact of transnational transfers on the shaping of a new world’s wine industry in the wake of the first wave of globalization. By investigating the role of transfers of wine-related literature from France to Australia, this paper intends to shed light on a neglected aspect regarding the circulation of knowledge through a transnational history.
ANTONIO DE RUGGIERO
Pontifícal Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul-PUCRS
Title of Presentation:
“Wine entrepreneurs: Italian immigrants and the winemaking industry in Rio Grande do Sul”
About:
Antonio de Ruggiero is Professor of History at the Pontifícal University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS) in Brazil. His recent research has focused on the history of Italian immigration to Brazil with a particular focus on transnationalism; skilled and entrepreneurial immigration; immigration and urbanization; political immigration, and the ethnic press.
Abstract:
The southern state of Rio Grande do Sul is the most important wine producing region in Brazil. The origins of the industry were concentrated in one region of the state, which was settled by immigrants3 from Italy who were attracted by government policies to occupy land that Brazilian elites considered almost uninhabited. These immigrants planted vines and made wine production a distinctive feature of the local economy. Originally produced for domestic consumption, this wine was soon marketed and sold in Rio Grande do Sul and neighbouring states. This paper will analyze the development of this immigrant-driven wine industry, which included the adoption of European varietals, reliance on transatlantic capital and the importation of new technologies.
DONNA M. SENESE
Department of Geography, the University of British Columbia Okanagan Campus
Title of Presentation:
“Winescape Heritage as Agricultural Landscape Resilience in the Southern Interior of British Columbia”
About:
Donna Senese is an Associate Professor of Geography at the Irving K. Barber School of Arts and Sciences at the Okanagan Campus of the University of British Columbia. She is a member of UBC’s Centre for Environmental Impact Assessment and is Founding Director of the Sonnino Working Group in Tuscany, Italy, an international transdisciplinary research and writing collective on rural sustainability, wine and local food. Her current research project looks at wine, iconography, and cultural diffusion.
Abstract:
As part of an ongoing, interdisciplinary research project exploring the agricultural landscape, its change and resilience, we document the heritage of wine production, and the winescapes it produces, in the Southern Interior valleys of British Columbia. Using the theoretical frame of Evolutionary Economic Geography (EEG), we pose the production of wine by settler populations as a driver of ecological and cultural landscape change and use a battery of mixed methods to shed light on the historical winescape. An image analysis of early photographs, help to document the wine industry, together with a content assessment of agricultural land holding archives and interviews with descendants of early wine producing settlers. The results are presented as story maps of the winescape that illuminate settler histories, and illustrate how wine production has shaped landscape resilience by driving mobilities, and spurring a shared aesthetic that further valorizes the historical precedence of settler agricultural production.
JAMES SIMPSON
Instituto Figuerola de Historia Y Ciencias Sociales, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Title of Presentation:
“Wine Quality and international transfers of technology, 1850-1939”
About:
An expert on globalization, transfer of knowledge and the growth of the wine industry in the New World, James Simpsonis a professor at Carlos III of Madrid. One of the leading scholars in the field of wine studies, he is known for his book entitled Creating Wine: The Emergence of a World Industry, 1840-1914 (Princeton University Press, 2011) for which he received the OIV Award in History by the International Organisation of Vine and Wine in 2012. Dr. Simpson has also published journal articles on the wine production in Argentina, Australia, and California.
Abstract:
This paper is divided into four sections. The first looks briefly at the importance of marked demand in the creation of fine wines in Europe between the late 17th and mid-19th centuries. Section two considers the experience of technological change in winemaking in the Old World (in particular, France and Algeria) at the turn of the 20th century. Section three argues that by 1900 there were rapid advances on eliminating the obstacles to successful winemaking in hot climates, with information being diffused globally among scientists and producers in both the Old and New Worlds. The final section shows how the New World industry developed its own production structures according to the nature of market demand, and concludes that it was only when these markets became more discriminating than fine wine production became possible, encouraging change, or leading to producers exiting from the industry.
STEVE STEIN
Department of History, University of Miami
Title of Presentation:
“Making Wine for the People’s Taste: The Emergence of Argentina’s Wine Industry, 1885-1915”
About:
Known for his exploration of the diverse factors that have shaped the development of Argentina’s wine industry, Steve Stein is a professor emeritus of History at the University of Miami. He is a leading scholar in the field of Latin American Studies, the author of several books on the history Peru including the rise of populism and social change in the early 20th century, political violence, polarization and State response in the 1980s, and the transformation of Andean folk art during the past four decades. His recent work focuses on Argentine wine history including the first comprehensive book and several book chapters and journal articles on industry development over the past 150 years.
Abstract:
The fact that Argentina is capable of producing superb wines should come as no surprise. Why did it take Argentina so long to achieve significant production of quality wines? The answer lies in the crucial choice wine produces faced from the founding years of the industry: make large quantities of mediocre wine, or much smaller quantities of good to excellent wine. Several critical factors had particularly strong influences on the quantity-quality equation: national and local government policies; knowledge and approach to winemaking; and probably most importantly, perceptions of the nature and growth potential of the consumer market. Focusing on the founding years (1885-1915), this paper will explore how these variables contributed to the creation of a model that would guide the growth of the Argentine wine industry for over a century.