Still in Sydney, where I’ve had the opportunity to share a good bottle of wine today during lunch time. A good bottle of Australian pinot noir. For a wine lover, this is always a great experience. People drink their pint of beer in a pub. People can ‘share’ a bottle of wine. Sharing means both drinking together wine from the same bottle. Often, sharing the cost of it. But it means much more than this. It is a great opportunity for socialization. Firstly, when the waiter comes and asks who will taste first. This is of course a way to test if wine is ‘bouché’. But this also a great opportunity to valorize guests, place them in the ultimate position to judge and open the ritual. Depending on the experience, comments can then enrich the experience. Wine becomes melted into the discussion, part of a great phenomenogical experience. Mediating it, but also leveraging it, making bodies and mind cool. But not too cool. Politeness also demands control. This would be particularly vulgar to become drunk with a great bottle. This wine-related socialization is thus not pure disinhibition. It cannot be pure disinhibition. It can nonetheless be a search for truth. That of the wine. Tasting is a subjective experience, which does not mean with a shared vocabulary that some consensus cannot be reached (I’ve always found this point fascinating). To reach this kind of consensus, this requires of course a shared world, that of initiated people. This initiation is a strongly embodied one (e.g. in the context of degustation and oenology courses). This requires tuning bodies intersubjectively like one would tune a music instruments. Interestingly, the bottle is also a metric of time. Sip after sip, wine disappears… and also the pretext to be together.
Sharing, control, intersubjectivity, gifts and counter-gifts, embodiment… I guess there is an interesting parallel to draw with the sharing economy and value co-creation.
In both cases, do not forget to “consommer avec moderation” (to enjoy in moderation) J
FdV
Thank you Francis-Xavier for this interesting post. I do not drink wine and no alcohol at all. Maybe I should start drinking for a better collaboration … uh, no. So what should I do ? It is true that interesting relationships are formed during this type of games with the attached rituals (games people play ?). As I can’t do it over a bottle of wine, I do it around another subject: the company’s journey. But socializing and collaborating around an abstract object such as a company is much more complex than doing it around a bottle of wine, an object that you can “touch together”. Precisely I remember one of your presentations at Paris-Dauphine that was exciting ; if I remember well, it is also in your book “Materiality and Time : Historical Perspectives on Organizations, Artefacts” where you write about Image-Object iconographies and how it helps somehow. Perhaps a shared value-creation is expected to return to what was practiced in the Middle Ages.