AUSTRALIAN AGRICULTURE WINE VINOLOGY

Australia became known as a wine drinking nation in the 1970s, and our national love affair with wine continues. Yet Australian winegrowing is as old as European Australia. While the Hunter Valley is not the ideal place to grow grapes climatically, it’s the only Australian wine region planted in the nineteenth century to continuously host vineyards. Hunter Wine profiles the people, history and technology that have shaped the region’s wine from vine to glass, including families like the Wyndhams, McWilliams, Lindemans and Tyrrells. It traces the evolution of Hunter winegrowing, and its winegrowers, from frontier violence in the 1820s and early British and German-born wine producers, to the development of large-scale vineyards and wineries in the early twentieth century, and the new style Hunter wines produced since the 1960s and 70s.

Time is an essential element of each glass of wine that we drink. Within moments of it being poured from a bottle, or when a barrel is exposed to air, wine begins to change in subtle and irreversible ways. At the other end of the temporal scale, the bedrock of the vineyard landscapes that grow the grapes to make this wine were formed over millennia past. From the deep past to the current moment, this book shows how historical influences and technological processes have shaped Hunter wine from vine to glass.

The Hunter Valley is Australia’s oldest wine region, so its history and heritage are integral to understanding how Australian wine has evolved. Australian cultures of making, selling and drinking wine are more than echoes of British and European traditions and trends — they represent new practices and styles. Hunter wine is the result of horticultural, chemical, technological, social and economic experimentation by men and women who have migrated to the region since the 1820s. In turn, the Hunter landscape and people have been shaped by the presence of vineyards and wineries since early colonisation.

This book gives new expression to connected histories of nature and culture in the region by viewing them through the lens of wine history.

‘This beautifully evocative, richly detailed book sets a new benchmark for writing about wine history in Australia.’ — Max Allen, Wine Journalist and author of The History of Australian Wine

‘An important Australian wine book that uncovers new truths, challenges old myths and moves at a cracking pace with a delicious wine tale just right for the present.’ — Jeni Port, Wine Journalist at The Age and 2014 Wine Communicator of the Year

• xiii, 303 pages : illustrations (some colour), maps, portraits, charts, facsimiles ; 24 cm
• Wine and wine making — New South Wales — Hunter Valley — History
• Wineries — New South Wales — Hunter Valley
• Vintners z New South Wales — Hunter Valley
• Hunter River Valley (N.S.W.) — Industries — History
• Hunter Valley (N.S.W.) — Industries — History
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