ABSTRACT
The concept of terroir in Australia, as a New World wine producer, is in formation through practice, insight, innovation and knowledge-making—perhaps constantly coming-into-being. This chapter explores specific wine encounters as a storied confluence of Australian locales, international traditions and the poetics of taste. Creative nonfiction, as the storying strategy used here, or ‘essaying as method’ (Carlin 2018), is a genre that combines creative-writing strategies, such as character and setting creation, and descriptive language, with research, analysis or theory. ‘Essaying offers a way of creatively broadening a critical purview to include the affective, the embodied, the ephemeral, the uncertain, the speculative’ (Carlin 2018). Young, emerging Australian winemakers, Jared Dixon of Jilly Wine Co., New South Wales, and Daniel Graham of Sigurd, South Australia, are at the forefront of (re)making an Australian terroir – through both honouring tradition, and risk-taking in experimentation. Their practice includes a return to cork and wax, minimal interference, wild yeast fermentation, and combing a number of grape varieties at hand in one wine style. A story of a developing Australian terroir is told through the careers and practice of the winemakers, one in emerging Australian wine regions. Australia terroir is shaping up to be regional/place based, though reworking notions of singularity and quality, through mixing of grape varieties. The current invocation of Australian terroir features a utopian practice of (re)enacting the past and instantiating a future, linking the global to the local, to (re)make Australian terroir.
