21st Century Mythologies Screw-Top Wine Bottle
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Oct 22, 2014 Peter Conrad riffs on Roland Barthes' essays, exploring modern myths through everyday objects. He critiques the screw-capped wine bottle as an emblem of demystified winemaking, contrasting it with the ritualistic cork. Gadgetry and novelty openers mask manual labor behind a façade of ceremony. Conrad links the aesthetics of corks and caps to wine's perceived value, while lampooning metaphors that frame screwcaps as oppressive. He warns about capitalism's grip on taste and how advertising shapes contemporary myths.
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Caps Demythologise Wine
- Screw-top wine bottles demythologise wine by exposing its industrial production rather than romantic ritual.
- Peter Conrad argues the form of the cap reduces wine to a banal consumer product, like a Coke can.
Cork As Ritual And Myth
- Cork functions as a ritual object linking wine to nature and the vine's earthbound origins.
- Conrad highlights cork's organic properties and how they feed myths of decay, sex, and ceremony around wine.
The Corkscrew's Mythic Worm
- The corkscrew's 'worm' nickname evokes burrowing and decay, adding to wine's mythic imagery.
- Conrad notes the corkscrew now faces obsolescence, replaced by a decorative opener for screw caps.
