Discourses on the vineyard and wine: new territories in the social imaginary

The Chilean wine industry has become one of the most dynamic exporting sectors over the last 30 years, pushing deep transformations in the territories where it is established. The paper examines the current imaginaries and discourses prevailing in the Chilean wine industry, in order to identify the role that the landscape and the wine territories play in its commercialization. Departing from Bourdieu ideas of social space and social exclusion, and from empirical evidence obtained through the analysis of official websites of wineries of the Chilean Central Valley, the article identifies five predominant elements in these discourses: tradition, European connection, terroir, environment, and exclusivity. The paper concludes that although the concept of terroir used in the websites relates to French ideas, it excludes workers and inhabitants from the wine territories, thus, it becomes a concept targeting exporting markets, as opposed to a concept with local and territorial identity. As such, the imagined territory distance itself from the local conditions.