Drinking the divine: fine wine, religion, and the socio-political in Aotearoa New Zealand

Fine wine – together with its producers and consumers – form a nexus that is frequently accorded divine provenance and sacred status along a continuum from the implicit to the explicit. This is evident at three moments of New Zealand history – in the explicit Christian ethos of nineteenth century European colonization; in the implicit sacredness and increasing dominance of romantic nationalism assigned to native flora and fauna (and to a lesser, more ambiguous, extent also to indigenous peoples) in the early twentieth century onward; and in the late twentieth century turn toward the cults of neo-liberalism and reflexive individualism. In all these instances the production, consumption and promotion of divine and/or fine wines are collusive modalities in the elite praxis – latent, overt and hegemonic – of prominent socio-political agents and institutions.