Cover -- Contents -- Prologue -- Acknowledgments -- Translator's Note -- Part 1 Taste, Modernity, Centre and Periphery -- Gourmet Physiology, or the Bourgeois Sorcery of Shapes -- Food for the Body, Fasting for the Soul -- Barthes: From the Semiology of Wine to the Empire of the Senses -- Part 2 Taste, Modernity and Centre I Bordeaux: The Human Condition as Purple Venality -- Montaigne: The Botrytis and Château d'Yquem -- Kierkegaard: A Philosophical Diet-et(h)ics and the Truthful Wine of Bordeaux -- Part 3 Taste, Modernity and Centre II Modernity and its Artificial Paradises -- Brillat-Savarin, Baudelaire, Marx and Benjamin: From the Order of  the Table and its Stimulants to t -- Hemingway, or the Alcoholic Outpourings of Valpolicella -- Monogamous Joyce and his Fendant de Sion Wine -- Svevo, the Unconscious and the Generous Wine of Istria -- Schwob, Stevenson and the Imaginary History of the Wines of Samos and Bourgogne -- Part 4 Taste, Modernity and Periphery Argentina: A Corpus of Wine and Food -- Sarmiento, the Fermentation of the Country and the Preservation of Wine -- Aldao: Servile Monk and Drinker -- Mansilla, or Vernacular Sybaritism -- Payró the Rogue: From the Counterfeiter of Carlón Wine to the Beaujolais of Villefranche -- The Shadow of Martínez Estrada and his Alimentary Radiography -- Marie Langer, or the Child as a Peronist Snack -- Index.