Ernesto Di Renzo of the University of Rome Tor Vergata presents "From Dionysus to Happy Hour: The Complexity of Wine Between History, Culture and Taste Experiences" at the Italian American Museum on Tuesday, February 27 at 6:30pm. 155 Mulberry St, New York, NY 10013. For reservations please call the Museum at 212.965.9000, send an email to [email protected] or fax 347.810.1028. Light refreshments will be served. Suggested donation of $10 per person.

About the Presentation: Wine is not only a Mediterranean food with certified functional values, nor an advantageous commodity capable of generating a market with considerable profits. Wine is a paradigmatic element of human creativity on which the various companies that have adopted its use have always worked complex interventions of cultural shaping, qualitative improvement and refinement of taste.

Testimony of man's transforming abilities on the dominion of nature, this alcoholic substance has constantly been in a position of economic centrality and food since its debut in history; a centrality which, with the gradual increase in consumption, has gradually widened to exceed the sphere of needs, pushing itself into the field of myth, religious practices, art, music and poetic-literary imagination.

The aim of the conference is to give a broad overview of the way in which wine has been placed in the presence of human experience, providing itself with codes of signification and tasting strongly shaped by the cultures in progress. Cultures that have from time to time defined modalities, times and places of the correct drinking. The aim is also to make people understand how wine is a key element between food needs, business practices, social rules, symbolic investments and sensory experiences of taste.