Finalist for the Louis R. Pondy Best Paper Based on a Dissertation Award
The market for cultural goods prizes authenticity, valuing those products that seem “true” to what they claim to be. But unstable supply-side conditions can disrupt production activities and put the achievement of authenticity at risk. Drawing on 16 months of ethnographic field work at an internationally-renowned winery (Cal-Cru) in Northern California, I examine how actors contend with instabilities in the production of authentic fine wine. Cal-Cru is widely regarded in the industry as having achieved authenticity. Yet, Cal-Cru’s achievement entails a perennial struggle with volatile production conditions. Multiple kinds of actors (i.e., humans, weather, plants, microbes) are given latitude to participate in the wine-making process, making production conditions highly unstable. Instead of following industry practice to mitigate or suppress these risks, I find that Cal- Cru actively promotes and sustains them, thus harnessing risk for authenticity. By allowing heterogenous actors to contest and destabilize the course of production—fostering what I call authenticity frictions—Cal-Cru cultivates risky conditions as a catalyst in the production of authenticity. This is achieved through a set of trajectory management practices that assimilate ongoing instabilities into the production process. My research explains how Cal-Cru’s consistent achievement of authenticity is accomplished not despite supply-side instabilities, but because of them.
