Wine production and consumption—including the movement of laborers, vines, pests, microbes, and drinking cultures—has long knit the world together. However, as historian Julie McIntyre has argued, scholarly interest in wine has directly increased with the “current globalization of grape wine production, distribution, and consumption” (2019: 1).
Much of this current scholarly interest on wine focuses on its role in European imperialism. Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre’s Imperial Wine: How the British Empire Made Wine’s New World represents a notable addition to this conversation. While many books on this subject have focused on the development of the wine industry in a single settler colony, Regan-Lefebvre instead takes the British Empire more broadly as her framework. A professor of history at Trinity College, Regan-Lefebvre focuses on the development of wine production in several settler colonies, including Australia and South Africa. She explores the creation of a British market for those wines from the...
University of California Press