Seeking the Ethics in Consumption: The Case of Wine and the Middle Classes of Post-Apartheid South Africa

Abstract

In this thesis, I critically examine wine, and the ethics tied to its consumption, in South Africa͛s Western Cape. In doing so, I expand the conceptual parameters of ethics typically applied to research on wines produced across the Global South. Additionally, by focusing on the perspectives of middle-class consumers in the Western Cape, I contribute to a body of knowledge that decentres the Global North as the site of ethical consumption and calls for the inclusion of underrepresented voices from across the Global South. I enrich my contributions in two ways. Firstly, I take a historicised approach to wine consumption in South Africa to examine the tensions that connect the contemporary context with its settler colonial- and apartheid legacies of regulation, restriction, and control according to social locations of race and class. Secondly, I consider these dynamics in relation to wine production in the Western Cape, including the roles of viticulture and vinification in establishing and embedding a racial hierarchy of white power and Black disenfranchisement and exploitation. This research is qualitative. It centres insights from 31 middle-class wine consumers in Cape Town and the Cape Winelands and 47 people working in the value chain for wine in South Africa. Data were collected in Cape Town and the Cape Winelands between October 2019 and March 2020. Methods of data collection included semi-structured interviews, observations, researcher diaries, and fieldnotes. The research interrogates three themes. Firstly, perspectives on contemporary consumer markets. Next, the evolution of wine consumption spaces. Finally, interpretations of ethics in the lives of wine consumers. Seeking the ethics in consumption, with a focus on middleclass consumers in the Global South, allows for a nuanced and complex analysis of a product that remains haunted by its entanglements with South Africa͛s painful legacies of settler colonialism and apartheid.