As Bacchus and Pan both surely know, the Barossa is a very important vignoble. At some stage or another of its manufacture, more of Australia’s wine passes through there than any other region. It is the home of some of our biggest wine refineries, as well as being “an extraordinary community of passionate artisans”, as one defender of the new Nick Cave Barossa advertisement made clear.
Between these notions of cute ivy-covered bluestone cellars and huge steel ethanol factories; between the new advertisement’s concern lying more with tourism than wine, showing only one glass, albeit “robustly glugging”, is where South Australia’s philosophical struggle between dry and wet continues to squirm.
While the advertisement does a fine job of promoting the Barossa’s capacity to roll in the dirt, shoot rabbits, pluck chooks and tear Apex Bakery’s stunning bread to bits, it coincides with top wine industry heavies belatedly struggling to cope with the revelations that big Barossa factories export wine in enormous plastic bladder packs to be bottled at the other end of the Earth.
It was hardly news to regular readers of columns like this, but earlier this year, BloombergBusinessweek discovered that Accolade (Hardy’s), Jacob’s Creek and Treasury engage in bladder-packing on a grand scale. “After the 10,000-mile journey, the wine is bottled at a plant next to a scrap merchant a two-hour drive from London,” David Fickling wrote.
As if to rub in some good old Barossa salt, the same influential journal ran ads with the headline “Refined”, with a text saying “To slash costs, the Australian wine industry now ships half its product in huge 24,000-litre plastic bags instead of glass bottles. Thirsty for the latest buzz on business innovations?”
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While wine industry PR boffins panic over this stale revelation – it was published on February 7 – we have ad agency KWP! telling us “the people we are talking to … shun vacuum-sealed packaged food from supermarket shelves and the over-processed falseness that abounds in their everyday lives”.
This see-sawing of contradictions lies deep in the community soul.
On the one hand, we have Deputy Premier John Rau struggling through more restrictive trading legislation to contain dangerous drunks and limit the damage they cause. On the other, there’s Gail Gago, Minister for Agriculture, Food and Fisheries – as well as being Minister for Regional Development – and Tourism and Sport Minister Leon Bignell, both striving to ensure our great wine regions prosper.
We have the Adelaide City Council’s move to restrict public drinking with the extension of the contentious and racist Dry Zones clashing with large taxpayer-funded public celebrations of food and wine. In the same way, we have ever harder and more punitive driving laws, and yet stage enormous taxpayer-sponsored V8 car races through the streets of the city each year, as if to provide our young with an extravagant example of what not to do, the whole shebang involving a great deal of public alcohol consumption by white people.
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"It’s far too long since the old Speaker’s Corner in Botanic Park closed down."
The template for this strangeness has long been part of South Australian culture. It’s small in comparison to the speedfest, but we have long managed to combine shooting firearms with beer consumption at the annual German Shützenfest, which was first held in 1865. The SA German Association claims this is “the largest folk festival in the Southern Hemisphere”, and that is celebrated because “good marksmanship was essential in the defence of medieval towns”.
My discussion of KWP! advertising’s beautiful, scary little movie is part of an ongoing bleat for a better public discussion on the nature of this wonderful part of the world and its inability to face its own inherent realities and the darker tones of its past.
Experiential tourism was the big thing in the Barossa of the late ’80s, when I lived there. Its invention coincided with sensible Barossadeutscher families swapping their smoky, damp mud and stone cottages from the 1800s for clean, comfortable, triple-front cream brick veneers with reverse cycle air conditioning. By the time the experiential and cultural tourists arrived, there were hardly any old stone walls left for them to peer over. And to keep those hardworking locals employed and prosperous, the giant steel and concrete refineries and factories were then being approved and constructed.
So what’s my solution? Better public discussion of the issues, for starters. More mature understanding of who we are, why we are here, and what we actually do. How many drugs we want to take, including grape-based ethanol. Given that our elected representatives seem unable to ease these contradictions by constructive discourse, it may help it we had an open alternative that is not a brief annual government-run festival.
So here’s a small start. I’m not talking about mob rule in the letting of government advertising contracts, but an inspiring method of easing the stifling overall community feeling of never being heard or believed. It’s far too long since the old Speaker’s Corner in Botanic Park closed down. The new Tarntanyangga/Victoria Square should include a permanent public fireplace so those who have met there for millennia can once again do so with impunity and dignity.
When the Dry Zone goes, a large permanent forum should be built so we can sit back and discuss stuff openly, just as was done on Melbourne’s Yarra Bank or is done in London’s Hyde Park. Right in the middle of our fair city. But here we could also buy a beer or a Barossa Shiraz from a chestnut smoker’s barrow or ice-cream stall, and be open about how much of our farmland is devoted to the production of very high-quality wine and beer.
That’d be an experience to advertise.
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