Wine as commodity has received enormous academic attention, while wine as gift has largely eluded significant dedicated research and analysis. This book addresses this lacuna with insights from leading scholars from a range of disciplines exploring wine as gift in different moments of history.

Peter J. Howland is a former tabloid journalist by mistake, an anthropologist by training, a sociology lecturer at Massey University, Aotearoa New Zealand, by occupation, and a neo-Marxist by analytical and moral compulsion. He has long-standing research interests in wine production, consumption and tourism and their role in the evolving constructions of middle-class identity, distinction, leisure, elective sociality, constructions of place, and reflexive individuality. He is author of Lotto, Long-drops & Lolly Scrambles: An Anthropology of Middle New Zealand (2004); editor of Social, Cultural and Economic Impacts of Wine in New Zealand (Routledge, 2014); and co-editor (with Assoc. Prof. Jacqueline Dutton, University of Melbourne) of Wine, Terroir and Utopia: Making New Worlds (Routledge, 2019). In 2019 he was appointed as a founding editor of the series Critical Beverage Studies for Routledge UK.

1. Wine as Gift and Commodity - An Imbricative Hybrid
2. The Gifting of Wine: Language, Representation and the Commodity Form
3. On Divine Wine: Wine Gifts Between Gods and Humankind
4. Hospitality, Gift Economy and Commercial Folklore
5. The Gifting of Champagne, 1850-2000: Public Performance or Personal Intimacy?
6. Terroir Aura: Tibetan Wine as Gift in China's Southwest
7. 'Without friends, you don't exist': The Value of Favours in Istrian Winemaking
8. Gifted Winemakers and the Commerce of Wine Gifting
9. Gifts That Pay For Themselves
10. Made To Give Away: Homemade Wine and the Gift
11. Gifting Dynamics of Calibrating and Aligning: An Exploratory Study of Expat Chinese Wine Gifting
12. Spitting or Sitting: The Commodification of Wine Tasting and Drinking as a Gift in Piedmont,Italy
13. Wine and the Gendered Self-Gift: Conceptual Considerations