Getting to the bottom of the wine lake: the social relations of over-production in the Clare Valley, South Australia
David Raftery, School of Archaeology and Anthropology, Australian National University
Over-production has been widely reported as a condition afflicting the Australian wine industry, and one that poses particular challenges for the health of the Australian industry. In this paper, I unpack three things. Firstly, I sketch some basic ethnographic contours of the wine grape growing, winemaking and wine marketing industries to show that it is simply untenable to posit a monolithic picture of a singular wine industry, with clearly shared interests and motivations. Secondly, referring to material collected in the preliminary stages of field work in the Clare region, I argue that over-production is in fact a recurrent, necessary, historical phenomenon; an expression of the tension between the cultivation and production of wine grapes, on the one hand, and the processing, distribution and marketing of wine on the other. Efforts to mediate these two fields occur every day within the wine industries; within family businesses, in the relationships between growers and winemakers, and in the actions and discourses of government and industry bodies. Concepts such as terroir, and the codification of wine production in terms of Geographical Indications, are two particular examples. A concluding discussion of these notions will highlight the ongoing challenge of reconciling the influence of local ecological, social and political factors with the demands of a globalised wine industry, and outline the next path for my own ethnographic research.
