In Crafting a Tibetan Terroir, Galipeau gives us a valuable, insightful and nuanced account of how indigenized subjects craft identities and landscapes as they produce wine. There are many types of winemakers in Shangri-La – a region in Northern Yunnan imagined, built and advertised for tourism by local authorities as a pure indigenous land. There, most wine producers are Tibetan villagers, who experience and participate in the wine industry in varied ways. There is no all-encompassing way of understanding either winemaking or “Tibetanness” in Shangri-La. Wine producers are entangled in varied regimes of material and cultural production. While some have control over both production and sales, others sell to companies set up by Chinese authorities or grow and produce wine for international conglomerates. These entanglements have an impact on the type of wine Tibetan communities produce, their agency and prosperity, but also the kind of terroir they are able to create.

Drawing on definitions of terroir explaining it as “taste of place,” often used by food producers to narrativize the typicity and value of their foodstuff, Galipeau also expands the concept, showing how terroir intersects with identity and landscape making. I found terroir a useful framework to understand how Tibetan farmers interact with wine, which they make into a commodity. Terroir connects production of a material commodity to the ways Tibetan actors view and shape both the landscape and themselves. This is, for example, visible in chapter one, where Galipeau looks at Cizhong Village. In this community, Catholic and Buddhist villagers see their wines as a legacy of French and Swiss missionaries who came to the region in the last two centuries.

To many of them, especially Catholic villagers, wine is part of the local Tibetan culture. Some villagers put particular care in making quality wine, reflecting the specificities of its heritage and creating their own local identity through the taste and stories of their wines. In doing so, they effectively construct their own terroir, through which they take back agency as Franco-Tibetan indigenous actors shaping their livelihood. As villagers from Cizhong define their identities and livelihood, they also shape the landscape through the kind of wine growing they choose to adopt. To portray their identity and promote their wines, villagers can cultivate a grape variety that is both local and the result of transnational exchanges, as well as adopt environmentally friendly farming methods. This has an impact on the landscape of Cizhong, which villagers also draw on to advertise both wines and their community to tourists. The case of Cizhong is one among many instances of what Galipeau frames as “indigenizing modernity” – the process via which Tibetan villagers craft selves, their surroundings and participation in wider economic processes. Each community, and each actor, has a different way of indigenizing modernity, with degrees of participation and agency varying according to the type of economic role they take in wine making.

Chapter four illustrates this by showing us a contrasting example. In Adong, villagers take part in wage labour, renting their lands and working in wine production for Moët Hennessy, a French transnational company. Although the deal they have with Moët provides villagers with a comfortable lifestyle, many find themselves back in the mountain in the summer, where they forage fungi. These villagers do so to rekindle a sense of agency and community, which is often challenged by both wage labour and Moët’s construction of a terroir excluding villagers’ participation. This terroir highlights climate and landscape, connecting them with the purity of an isolated Tibetan village, to promote wine to consumers abroad. Villagers’ labour does not appear in this narrative. From these examples, Galipeau shows that terroir is not a monolithic branding device, but a way of building communities and identities beyond wine, drawing on both foreign and local understandings of place. Because of these, who has control over terroir narratives can shape communities, landscapes and livelihoods – whether it is villagers, local governments or foreign companies.

One of the other strengths of Galipeau’s ethnography is how he writes about his interlocutors and embeds them in wider dynamics. Through his many visits over the years, Galipeau has built a relationship of trust and care with Tibetan villagers. I found some of his descriptions quite moving, which shows the depth of Galipeau’s engagement as he was conducting ethnographic fieldwork and participating in communities’ lives. Like his interlocutors’ lives, Galipeau’s research can also take a transnational scope, as he undertook archival research in Switzerland to complement his interlocutors’ stories. This method helps him highlight the continuing transnational nature of the Tibetan wine trade. Transnational interactions are not only historical but also persist through sustained engagement between villagers and more recent French and Swiss settlers in the region, who continue to participate in wine making.

Although he makes important contributions to the study of terroir, Galipeau could perhaps have further explored the sensorial aspect of the concept. If terroir comes to embody different ways of being Tibetan, then both the body and taste are important in understanding how this terroir is created. It would have been fascinating to see how locals and tourists taste the different beverages produced in the region, and how this contributes to terroir identities.

This book makes important contributions to anthropological studies of taste, identity-making and agricultural practices in relation to livelihoods and sustainability, by providing an original take on terroir. Similarly, it will nuance and complement understandings of ethnic relations and politics, as well as local economic development in China. I recommend this book to both students and researchers in anthropology and China studies wishing to deepen their knowledge of these issues.