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Chapter 2: Wine Landscapes and Regions
Geographers have always been keenly interested in wine. Wine is an expression of a place and its people. As such, understanding wine requires understanding places and the people who live and work there. That makes it so very interesting to Geographers.
There are a great many online resources for looking at landscapes. They range from photo-essays and photography to academic and applied works, and to those which are purely theoretical. The links below provide resources for understanding how landscapes are interpreted and how those interpretations are applied in landscape preservation.
Peirce Lewis’ Axioms for Reading the Landscape An Outline of American Geography: Regional Landscapes of the United States The Cultural Landscape Foundation UNESCO World Heritage Center Cultural Landscapes site U.S. National Park Service, Protecting Cultural Landscapes site
The Peirce Lewis link is for his paper, ’Axioms for Reading the Landscape’. It provides the full-text of the paper and is a nice cookbook for learning how to read and interpret landscapes. If you would like to read more about landscapes you might want to read other works by Lewis’ or works by authors such as J.B. Jackson, David Lowenthal, and Wilbur Zelinsky. The second link is for a text on the regional geography of the United States. It does not do much with wine, but the first few chapters do provide a nice primer on regions and how we define them. There is also a glossary which can be useful not only for this chapter, but for terms in the other chapters as well. The three cultural landscape sites provide a background in landscape preservation not just in terms of wine regions, but in terms of all those places which are culturally significance.
Sites about Saint Emilion: Union of Saint Emilion Producers (English language version is not working at the moment)
Things to Consider: Can you apply Pierce Lewis’ ‘Axioms’ to your landscape? What features are consistent across all wine landscapes? What features are unique to the wine landscapes near you? How is technology changing landscapes in general and wine landscapes in particular?
*The picture above, from Chapter 2, is of Saint Emilion and is courtesy of David Callan’s web site www.housenumbers.com |
