‘Come to your Senses, Come to South Australia’
John Claridge, Anthropology, University of Adelaide
This paper examines marketing practices and discourses about taste and constructions of place, in relation to tourist visits to wineries and cellars doors in South Australia. Despite the images and discourses that I encountered of wine as an apolitical rural enterprise and product of nature, wine is an economic and socio-political artefact. Marketing discourses promoted visions of natural wine places. In practice, the semiotic, physical, and economic manipulation of the surrounding environment within which tourists moved was paramount to the construction of tourist experiences and participation in wine tasting events. Ethnographic examples include Banrock Station Wine and Wetlands Centre and Penfolds winery at Magill and the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation.
