Wine, Meaning, and Cultural Renewal in a Brave New World—with Grégory Brun

This second evening will be devoted to myth and semiotics in contemporary wine culture. We will discuss how images, narratives, and codes generate meaning, how stories substitute for encounter, and how symbolic language is reorganized through labels, tasting rooms, prestige cues, and mediated experience. We will expand on the problem of hyperreality, when signs circulate with diminishing reference to land, labor, or craft, and experience becomes a managed simulation of authenticity. We will examine how meaning is shaped, transferred, and thinned in this environment, and how symbolic life might remain anchored in practices capable of sustaining depth, continuity, and relation.