Steering Group

Julian Alston is director of the Center for Wine Economics at the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science and a distinguished professor emeritus in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Davis. He works on a wide range of topics related to the economics of grapes and wine and related public policy.

Steve Charters MW is Professor of Wine Marketing at Burgundy School of Business in Dijon, teaching and researching on wine culture and business. Author of Wine and Society (Elsevier, 2006) and coordinating editor of the Routledge Handbook of Wine and Culture (2022). He blogs on the social and cultural context of wine at Wine and Culture.

Marion Demossier is a social anthropologist at University of Southampton (UK), Department of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics who has published extensively on wine culture. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in France, New Zealand, Switzerland and Zambia and she is interested in interdisciplinarity and the politics of agroecological transition.

Jacqueline Dutton is Professor of French Studies at the University of Melbourne, specialising in wine and food as transcultural products of regional, national and international geopolitics. Her interest in future-oriented methods guides her search for better ways of thinking, working, and being together. She is Founding Director of The Pinot Noir Project and has curated major international festivals and events in Australia, France, and Myanmar.

Graham Harding is an Oxford-based wine historian and Wine Steward of St Cross College, Oxford. After professional careers in publishing and marketing, he returned to the study of history, completing a PhD and award-winning book on the history of champagne in Britain. He has also written widely on the long-term development of marketing and branding in the wine trade.

Peter J. Howland (Massey University) is a former tabloid journalist by mistake, an anthropologist by training, a sociologist by occupation, and a neo-Marxist by analytical and moral compulsion. He researches wine as a ‘field of action’ and a means to critically explore constructions of identity, distinction, sociality, rurality and urbanity. In 2019, he founded the Critical Beverage Studies series for Routledge UK.

Olivier Jacquet is executive project manager at the UNESCO Chair ‘Cultures et Traditions Vitivinicoles"‘ and a research historian (HDR) within the CNRS Interdisciplinary Research Laboratory on ‘Societies, Sensibilities, and Care’ (UMR 7366 LIR3) at the University of Burgundy. He works on the evolution of wine quality standards, wine organizations, wine economics and wine tasting during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Jennifer Smith Maguire is Professor of Cultural Production and Consumption in Sheffield Business School, and Associate Dean of Research, Innovation and Knowledge Exchange, Sheffield Hallam University. Jennifer’s research examines the construction of markets, tastes and value, often through the lens of the production and intermediation of ‘natural’ and biodynamic wine.