Not in my back vineyard – development plans threaten Coonawarra and Champagne vineyards

We live in the so-called developed world and it seems we’ve gone development mad. Lately, I’ve posted blogs about plans to:

• build a road bridge spanning some 1.7km, set to tear through one of the most scenic and high profile vineyard areas on the Mosel and directly across the famous Urziger Würzgarten vineyard (see here)
• construct a micro-brewery development next door to Cullen Wines, to which Cullen have objected on the basis that yeast cells from the brewery may escape and contaminate the wild vineyard yeasts which define their wines (see here)
• develop a huge 177 hectare new suburb called Seaford Heights on the doorstep to McLaren Vale, on “extraordinary geology” which has recently been identified as having the potential to become “one of the world’s great terroirs” (see here). 

This week’s mail bag includes news about a legal battle to prevent the French national atomic agency ANDRA from dumping nuclear waste near its vineyards (see the Decanter report here) and plans to build a bypass road around the town of Penola in Coonawarra, which will diagonally cut through four vineyards, destroying vines planted on the region’s renowned terra rossa soils.  One of the vineyards threatened belongs to Wynns, whose Chief Winemaker Sue Hodder and Group Viticulturist Alan Jenkins just scooped the Gourmet Traveller Winemaker of the Year award 2010.  As Hodder explained to me in May, Jenkins was instrumental in the rehabilitation of Wynn’s oldest vines (see here) – maybe Mr Jenkins can work his magic on the local council too? 

At any rate, I’m not sure if it’s very developed to drive a coach and horses, trucks actually, through Coonawarra.  It makes a nonsense of all the wrangling, concluded in 2001, about this famous wine region’s boundary.  That focused on those unique qualities, notably said terra rossa soils, which underwrite Coonawarra’s worldwide reputation for Cabernet Sauvignon wines in particular. 

As I said in my blog about the proposed McLaren Vale development and I’ll say it again, extraordinary geography or sacred sites (borrowing a term used by Yalumba’s Brian Walsh at the Landmark Tutorial) offer a point of differentiation which commands great currency in this competitive world of ours.  In a climate where Australia struggles with a surplus of increasingly hard to sell volume wine against which its fine wine offering remains a relatively unseen drop in the ocean, should not such sites’ fine wine potential be explored and, in the case of Coonawarra, rigorously protected?  As James Halliday concluded in his closing remarks at the Landmark Tutorial, the Australian industry has not seriously relied on fine wine until now, but now is the time to do so.

Finally, there’s another “sacred site” angle that is specific to Coonawarra.  You may have heard about the recent canonisation of Australia’s first saint, Mary MacKillop.  As Treasury Wine Estates (which owns Wynns) points out “this region is set to experience a dramatic increase in tourism and development. We are concerned that the location of the bypass road will negatively impact the future growth prospects of Penola’s expansion and Coonawarra cellardoors, particularly as heavily laden trucks will be bypassing Penola and funnelled directly onto the section of the Riddoch Highway where all the cellardoors are located. This will create a dangerous mix of slow moving vineyard and tourist traffic with fast-moving trucks. Our campaign is designed to raise awareness of the negatives of the Councils bypass road and also suggest that a better option would be to build a bypass road around both Penola and Coonawarra. While this option would be more expensive, it would preserve the terra rossa vines and enable the benefits of the tourism growth to be fully realised.”  Sounds like a plan to me and one with long term legs, which stands to benefit the region for years to come.

Click here to read more about the heart of coonawarra campaign and register your views on the development proposals.