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Wine Studies

Wine Studies is a new humanities and social science-based research area at University of Newcastle.  Cross-faculty collaboration in this field, administered from the Humanities Research Institute, presently includes scholars from History, Social Science, Business and Tourism.

Why Wine Studies?

Wine drinking is not just an ordinary activity of daily life, but an extraordinary one. As opposed to food, for which we have a fundamental biological drive, wine is a matter of choice, of taste, and often denotes a cultured, not just cultural, identity. As such its history is studied in Europe, even Britain, as a trade commodity and a value-laden drink. Yet trade and consumption are dependent on production, which is under-researched historically and sociologically. 

In the Australian context, there were grape plants on the First Fleet, with elite visions for a wine industry. These visions led to vines first being planted in the Hunter Valley NSW in 1830. The region’s continuous wine production makes it Australia’s oldest wine region; older than the more popularly known Barossa SA, and one of the oldest New World wine regions.

Wine Studies @ UoN

The proximity of University of Newcastle’s Callaghan, Ourimbah and Port Macquarie campuses to the Hunter Valley and Hastings Valley vineyards and wineries enables a regional focus and we welcome inter-regional, national and international collaborations in wine studies.

Industry and community partnership

Two Partner Organisations have committed to current plans for research on the Hunter Valley wine producing community.

The Hunter Valley Wine Industry Association (HVWIA) is a non-profit incorporated association and the peak body for Hunter Valley wine businesses. The HVWIA values our proposed research because it will record and preserve the oral history of Hunter wine industry elders, produce an intellectually grounded and reliable history of Hunter wine, identify heritage sites and vines, and bring these stories together in a significant exhibition.

The Newcastle Museum is one of Australia’s leading regional museums with a mission to collect, preserve and interpret objects and stories for and about Newcastle and the Hunter; providing access to these in an innovative, inspiring, and engaging way. The Museum values the research our collaboration will provide because it lacks knowledge about the region’s wine industry that this project will contribute. It provides an opportunity to actively collaborate as a Partner Investigator on research using an untapped archive and artefacts virtually at the doorstep of the Museum.

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Events 2013

A Taste of Wine Studies

The Second University of Newcastle Humanities and Social Science Wine Studies Seminar
Hosted by the Humanities Research Institute, FEDUA and the University Gallery

Did you know Queensland has a sophisticated wine industry that has emerged from the region’s Italian diaspora to constitute a major tourist attraction?  Plus: just as the blending of grape varieties can produce wines greater than the sum of their varietal parts, the breadth and depth of scholarship on the complex of wine production, distribution and consumption benefits too from a blend of disciplinary research approaches.  To what extent does this blending of disciplines define the emerging field of wine studies?

These are the issues to be explored this week when visiting scholars from History and Anthropology at the University of Southern Queensland join fellow Wine Studies researchers from History and Business at The University of Newcastle to discuss their work. 

Chair: Dr Rebecca Mitchell, The University of Newcastle

Presentations:
Dr Robert Mason & Dr Celmara Pocock, University of Southern Queensland 
Strange Birds: Transforming experiences in wine tourism & regional heritage

Dr Julie McIntyre, The University of Newcastle
"Notes on Blending Disciplines: Towards a definition of wine studies"

Fine Arts Meeting Room downstairs, The University Gallery, Callaghan;
3.00 – 4.30pm Thursday 23 May 2013. 
All welcome. No RSVP required. Wine and cheese will be served.

Events 2013

Inaugural Wine Studies Symposium A cross-faculty event hosted by the Humanities Research Institute at the University Gallery, 30 November 2012.

Vintage: the lost works of Max Dupain
6 November to 1 December 2012.

This Vintage exhibition brings together for the first time two glorious collections of forgotten images of wine grape vintages in the Hunter - heart of Australia's wine world in the mid-20th centrury - by the legendary photographer Max Dupain. Dupain took the photographs on commission as part of his commercial practice, and his skill in capturing the arcadian beauty of the everyday work of vignerons, grape harvesters and cellar hands represents a sublime encounter between the world of art and the world of wine. The McWilliam's Mount Pleasant images are held in the National Library of Australia but are little known within Dupain's wider opus. The equally significant but never-before-exhibited Tulloch photographs were gifted by Dupain to the family in an album of original photographs printed by Max himself. Presented together the Mount Pleasant and Tulloch photographs reveal a little known part of Australia's farming past and the labours of love which produced some of the most memorable wines of the early 1950s. Several of these Dupain images are part of an older collection of photographs which include photographs, artworks and objects reproduced in a new book by University of Newcastle historian Dr Julie McIntyre, which shows the importance of wine growing in early Australia. The book, First Vintage: wine in colonial New South Wales, was launched at the exhibition opening and is available for purchase from the University Co-op Bookshop. This exhibition is supported by the Faculty of Education and Arts and the Faculty of Business and Law as part of their commitment to interdisciplinary research in Wine Studies.

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Publications

Books 

McIntyre Julie. (2012) First Vintage: Wine in colonial New South Wales, UNSW Press, University of New South Wales, Sydney, AU

Journals

McIntyre Julie (2011): Adam Smith and Faith in the Transformative Qualities of Wine in Colonial New South Wales, Australian Historical Studies, 42:2, 194-211

McIntyre, Julie (2011) Resisting ages-old fixity as a Factor in wine qyuality : Colonial wine tours and Australia's ealry wine industry, The Australasian-Pacific Journal of Regional Food Studies 2011 Number 1 42-64

Allen Michael Patrick, Germov John Boris (2010) Judging taste and creating value : The cultural consecration of Australian wines, Journal of Sociology 2011 47: 35

McIntyre Julie  (2009) Not Rich and Not British:Philip Schaeffer, 'Failed' Colonial Farmer Journal of Australian Colonial History, Vol. 11, 2009: 1-20.ISSN: 1441-0370.

Mcintyre, Julie. (2008) "'Bannelong sat down to dinner with Governor Phillip, and drank his wine and coffee as usual": Aborigines and wine in early New South Wales'. History Australia 5(2): pp. 39.1 to 39.14.001: 10.2104/ha080039

McIntyre Julie. (2007) Camden to London and Paris: The Role of the Macarthur Family in the Early New South Wales Wine Industry,The Author History Compass 5/2 (2007): 427–438, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00419.x Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Dunstan, David  (2006) With Sam Benwell and the house of lords journeying to wine in Victoria, Journal of Australian Studies, 30:87, 87-99

Dunstan David, Some vintage specimens and newer breeds of Australian wine, The Wine Press