Paper short abstract:

In Australian wine producing regions, appropriate use and management of water is a fundamental concern. This paper explores the diverse meanings and values that water of different types can hold in South Australian viticultural landscapes, arguing for a conceptual focus on 'hydrosocial terroir'.

Paper long abstract:

The taste and qualities of a wine or other agricultural product are often said to be fundamentally influenced by terroir: geographical specificity and the interplay of emplaced natural and human processes. Wine producers and regions therefore trade on understandings of value bound to place. Traditionally, this has related most specifically to soils and geologies, but in many Australian wine regions a more fundamental question revolves around access to and management of water. This paper, based upon ongoing ethnographic research in the McLaren Vale and Langhorne Creek wine regions of South Australia, explores the way agrarian landscapes are understood through peoples’ complex, emplaced hydrosocial relationships: with ground and surface water, and the technologies, governance and social relations of irrigation regimes. In these regions, an ethical imperative to conserve and appropriately manage water resources in the face of water scarcity and climate risk is reflected in a valorisation of practices that minimise water wastage, including water recycling, minimal-irrigation and dry-growth viticulture. A hydrosocial terroir perspective thus emphasises the role of water in production and brings into focus the sometimes-difficult relationships between viticulture and other land uses. It raises questions about how we value water: as an economic resource for production? As a common good? As a precarious source of life and liveliness? We often conceive of water as a homogenous substance approached quantitatively and volumetrically, but in this paper I argue that it is best instead to think of waters as plural and heterogeneous, with vastly different meanings, qualities and implications.