Placing wine in post-colonial agrifood worlds

We present recently published work exploring contention and confusion over terroir and provenance in the premium wine industry in Australia. Place and authenticity are key attributes of the wine place experience and are critical to premium wine markets. Our work provides a conceptual framework for understanding the wine place experience across the value chain. It proposes the use of evidence-based storytelling to enhance the wine consumer experience and add value to biophysical wine research. While this research was focused on supporting wine industry and wine researchers, in the context of the challenge to ‘unsettle food politics in Australasia’, for this presentation, we seek to extend this work into speculative terrain. We take the opportunity to map these wine place dimensions onto colonisation and its unresolved legacies of ruptured place connections. The wine world’s ongoing struggles to resolve questions of place, connection and authenticity between ‘old world’ origins and ‘new world’ replications have clear alignments with the challenges of postcolonial agri-foodscapes. This presentation seeks to outline how the place contradictions across wine agri-foodscapes, business and culture can be subject to post-colonial critique and reflection. This has potential to deepen wine place understanding and contribute to post-colonial justice.