Critical Acts of Commensality and Cultural Capital: How Madeira Wine Served Social Functions Among Anglophone Elites (1815 to 2000)

Abstract

Anglophone elites around the Atlantic World developed a deep appreciation for the fortified wines of Madeira. By the late eighteenth century, madeira wine constituted an important luxury good whose purchase signaled taste, refinement, esoteric knowledge, and affluence. In other words, collecting and consuming madeira wines functioned as cultural capital in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense. A second concept from food history applies to social beverages like wine: commensality. Commensality may be defined as the act of people eating and drinking together. It captures the essential human bonds that people who drink or dine together frequently create. These bonds affect social connections as well as business ties. Some scholarship examines madeira as cultural capital and the scholarship on commensality pays attention to feasts. This paper will join these two lines of scholarship and focus on feasts, madeira parties, and the interaction between cultural capital and commensality when drinking madeira wine.

Keywords: Commensality; Cultural Capital; Madeira Wine.