A taste of nostalgia: Memory, culture and the senses in Joanne Harris’s Blackberry Wine (2000)

When it comes to food as a cultural entity, its importance as part of our communities of interaction goes well beyond its function as mere physical nourishment. It seems virtually impossible to talk about food and memory without talking about taste and smell. The connection between food, memory and the senses relies on the understanding that particular elements of the past are embedded in our identities and sense of self. Closely related to their food counterparts, drinks have also been at the centre of ongoing scholarly attention. Wine, in particular, has been the focus of debates surrounding notions of taste, provenance, storytelling, branding, habit and memory. As far as both food and drink are concerned, however, the remembrance of the senses – and the sociocultural experiences connected to them – is often shrouded in a layer of nostalgia, which inevitably complicates how we perceive experiences, as either authentic or (re-)constructed. Taking this idea as a point of departure, this article focuses on the connections between the sensorial experience of food and drink and the construction of memories in Joanne Harris’s novel Blackberry Wine (2000). Specifically, the article explores how Harris portrays the experience of wine-drinking – with a focus on taste, smell and the notion of terroir – as interdependent upon both cultural knowledge and familiar sensorial experiences. The discussion also exposes how these are eventually tacitly (and perhaps inadvertently) connected in the novel to the problem of consumerist exploitation, and how nostalgia is channelled in order to render products desirable to prospective customers.