5.2 Suggestions to Reduce Barriers in Cross-cultural Communication 15

Bibliography 17

1 Introduction

In the development of human civilization, wine has played a key role in the people’s social life. In both China and Western countries, there is a common scene where wine is connected with our social activities on various occasions in different circles. In cases such as business banquets, international diplomatic banquets, or friends’ and relatives’ gatherings, wine is always used as one of the carriers of cultures. Therefore, wine is not an isolate material in existence, it has already been integrated into our human cultures with its appearance in our life.

Wine culture is a conscious embodiment of wine material. It shows the process of how human beings have recognized wine, made wine, and used wine. It includes the mutual and interdependent influences, with the utility of more and more wine material in our social activities. Wine culture, as one of the basic factors in the formation of human culture, is a topic so widespread that no one can avoid in the development of our human civilization.

However, people in different countries have formed different wine cultures. The different characteristics are also manifested in Chinese and western wine cultures. Due to the differences, some misunderstandings and problems occur unavoidably in intercultural communication between Chinese and western countries on wine connotation. By knowing more about the differences between wine cultures, on the one hand, can promote cross-cultural communication and prompt world harmony. On the other hand, we can have a better understanding of our own wine culture.

The wine culture both in China and Western countries has maintained a long history, and various papers and books on wine culture have been kept in record. Either in China or in the West, the research on wine culture has made great achievements in recent years, which contributes to further investigation into certain aspects of differences and similarities of Chinese and western wine culture. The trend of wine development in future is also inseparable from the wine culture considering the overall situation and judgment of the market underlying the wine culture. In order to have a smooth  cross-cultural communication, it is necessary to us to understand the concepts and developments of Chinese and western wine culture in the first place.

1.1 The Wine Culture in China

When we trace back to wine culture in China, many tales about the origin and development of wine can be found in our cultural heritage. The ancient legend of wine-making would usually regard the  invention of wine as the wonderful piece of works of god. There are also some specific records about the wine-making by human beings in the course of the development of agricultural civilization, which offered opportunity of the appearance of grain wine as a very important role in the later brewing. This indicates that wine has begun to appear in social life as a kind of material created by human beings, and human beings have a conscious need for the particular drink. With the advancement of agriculture, it is certain that more crops were being stored for later consumption. However due to the failure of proper storage, the trouble of mildewed grains came alongside and the proper handling of the mildewed grains provided our ancient ancestors with the opportunity to brew wine with the headache grains. People drank the wine made from grain and felt satisfied and learned to brew it. It can be inferred from the very wine making by our ancestors who started the epochal creation of grain brewing in the early time. By the Shang dynasty, great progress had been made in brewing technology, and distiller’s yeast began to be applied into the wine brewing. "Distiller" is a brewing ferment made from germinating grain. Thus the grain brewing follows two steps with a unique brewing method of solid state fermentation and distilling process.

In China, the first person to use the expression “wine culture” was Professor Yu Guangyuan, a famous economist, in the 1985 “ Contemporary Chinese Dictionary ” . He thinks: “The wine culture, a kind of traditional Chinese cultural phenomenon with wine and wine tasting as the main content. Its production has a close relationship with the historical and customary geographical environment of the wine's place of production and the characteristics of the wine's production process.”(Contemporary Chinese Dictionary,1985). Chinese wine culture is a kind of social culture; Chinese wine culture is even more an artistic culture (see Yang Li, 2005:2).