A Few Cases of Illicit Gin and Natural Wine: Toward a Twenty-First-Century Performance of Terroir

“Terroir” has held many meanings. The historical flow of terroir that begins in France, through Italy, and to the United States is incomplete—but proposes that the definition and application of the word is one that is ever-changing. Francophone Studies scholar Thomas Parker argues in Tasting French Terroir: The History of an Idea (2015) that “as the layers of terroir’s history are peeled back, they reveal a longstanding ambivalence toward the concept” (Parker 2015: 4). From the late sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century, whether a particular food was imbued with a noticeable terroir was not always a desirable trait in French culture. This first instance of terroir shifts among agricultural ethics, culinary aesthetics, a positive, and a pejorative. This ambivalence, I propose, continues on as tastes are shaped by globalization, industrialization, and environmental destruction. To illustrate the layers of meaning that terroir incites, I turn to performance, which captures the daily rituals, such as my performance working in a Los Angeles natural wine shop, to more explicitly theatrical works, such as a performance installation and tasting experience by Nigerian artist Zina Saro-Wiwa and her Illicit Gin Assemblies. I argue that while “terroir” has remained throughout the last few centuries as a critical term in dictating human relations to the environment through food, global, aesthetic, and mediated shifts to food cultures restage the term as one that is reliant on performance. Ultimately, an embodied, narrative, economic, and environmental lens shape my analysis of a case of natural wine and a performance of illicit gin.