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Spitting at professional tastings is de rigueur for the simple reason that the taster would be much too intoxicated to evaluate wine in any objective way after 50 samples. However, while doing ethnographic fieldwork with winegrowers in Piedmont, Italy, I quickly understood that spitting was sometimes viewed as a rejection of a gift. This chapter explores the ways in which consuming or not fully consuming wine can create or break social bonds. Ethnographic examples draw into question notions of objectivity in taste and explore the affect of taste that is created through sharing wine. Although marketing often seeks to trigger feelings and emotions around wine, these are not generally attached to a specific place or the people laboring to produce the beverage. Professional wine tastings construct a commodity that is largely devoid of personal relationships, and taste is stripped of social meaning for commercial purposes. In contrast, drinking wine with growers builds social bonds and creates an affect of taste that connects narratives of production, the experience of taste and place, and social meaning through the gift of sharing wine. These are both examples that demonstrate different forms of value that are created when the same object circulates as a commodity or a gift.
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