Converging Terroir Typicity for Political Usage and Didactic Normativity. The Metonymical Institutionalization of Wine in Luxembourg

The current aestheticization and hyper-differentiation of wines in terms of their region of origin is part of a broader historical process of rationalization. Three vectors have since the nineteenth century played a key role in the forming of oenophilia: these are regulation by the state, scientific consolidation and dissemination via the media—whose convergent effects have contributed in constructing an object with particular characteristics. This cultural figure draws on the normativity of these three vectors, all of which have underscored the importance of the geographical provenance of wine in order to use it depending on their respective positions. In the economic-juridical and political-symbolic manifestations of the vector of state regulation, this “origin” refers to a cultural region of national sovereignty which is constructed in a metonymic way as the native region of national specificity. In the didactic realizations of oenophile normativity, emerging from the vector of scientific consolidation, this “origin” refers in an epistemic way to parcellated vineyard regions which are constructed as terroirs by the interaction of traditional, man-made viticultural techniques and the natural conditions, holding sensory potentials whose sub-text is of a moral order.