A sense of place

Dr Rory Hill, who is Coordinator of the EIT School of Viticulture and Wine Science’s postgraduate programmes, was invited to contribute to The Routledge Handbook of Wine and Culture, along with his former colleague, Associate Professor Joanna Fountain from the Department of Tourism, Sport & Society at Lincoln University in Christchurch.

The book is a major compendium of research on wine and culture going back in history, aimed at researchers and students in the wine industry and across academic disciplines where wine is taken as an object of study, including history, geography, tourism, sociology and business.

Rory says their chapter examines how a sense of place is built by producers and understood by consumers, in the antipodal wine regions of North Canterbury and Burgundy. “If North Canterbury is an emergent region of the New World, Burgundy is a self-consciously old part of the Old World. The concept of terroir (a sense of place) is mobilised in both regions, but with different inflections, and in North Canterbury, it is just one of several terms employed to promote local distinctiveness.”

Rory says the documentary film A Seat at the Table, released in 2019, brought the concept of terroir and the idea of provenance-driven quality in New Zealand wine to the fore, in direct comparison with the Burgundian winemaking experience and tradition. “In our chapter, we reveal some of the cultural rooting of expressions of sense of place in two very different contexts, as well as the cultural conditioning of wine tourism as an activity.”