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Samuel de Pury's vineyard, Yarra Valley, drawn c. 1898 by William Barak
© MEN (Musée d'ethnographie, Neuchâtel) Reproduced with permission |
(In 2013 I hosted an event at the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival called Terroir
= Belonging to Country, where guest speakers discussed Aboriginal notions
of belonging and European concepts of terroir in an attempt to gain a deeper
understanding of who and where we are. What follows was some background reading.)
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In 2003, Clare Valley winemaker Jeffrey
Grosset delivered the inaugural New South Wales Wine Press Club lecture in
Sydney. His topic was terroir - that evocative French word describing how the country, climate and culture of a vineyard site produces
wine that tastes unique. And what Grosset said that day was revolutionary.
‘Terroir is the French word for what some
have known in Australia for thousands of years as pangkarra,’ he said. ‘Pangkarra
is an Aboriginal word used by the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains. It is a
word that, like terroir, represents a concept that has no English translation
but encompasses the characteristics of a specific place – the climate, sunshine,
rain, geology and the soil–water relations. About the closest we can get in
English is to refer to the site, but even that doesn’t really cover the major
components of terroir - or pangkarra - being the soil and the local topography.
In essence, a wine has a certain taste not just because of the variety and
vineyard management but because of its place. People who say, “this is my
place, I belong here” are more likely to grasp the concept than people who say,
“this is my place, this belongs to me”.’
Sitting in the audience, I was blown away
by this imaginative leap of thought. Australian grape growers and winemakers
have often used Aboriginal words to name their vineyards, wineries, regions and
brands, and the use of Aboriginal imagery - from ‘dot paintings’ to Yellow Tail
marsupials - is also widespread on wine labels. But here Grosset was travelling
beyond the words and the images to engage with an ancient Aboriginal worldview,
and by doing so was suggesting a new, profound and unique way of thinking about
terroir in Australia.
---
Aunty Carolyn Briggs understands precisely
what Jeffrey Grosset is talking about.
Aunty Carolyn is an elder of the Boon Wurrung
people. For thousands of years, since long before white settlers arrived in
Victoria in the early 1800s, the Boon Wurrung have been the traditional owners of the
country that stretches from Werribee River, just to the west of present-day
Melbourne, round the eastern side of Port Phillip Bay, down into the Mornington
Peninsula and south to Wilson’s Promontory.
I have come to talk with Aunty Carolyn
because the Melbourne suburb I live in is Boon Wurrung country, and I want
to find out if there is a word in Boon Wurrung language that might be similar
to the Kaurna word, pangkarra.
This to me was the most exciting
implication of Grosset’s original lecture: that there must be or must have been
dozens of different Aboriginal words that might capture or hint at the meaning
or spirit of terroir, because Australia’s vineyards are planted in regions identified
with dozens of discrete Aboriginal language groups. In some cases, the old
language group areas are remarkably similar to the boundaries of modern-day
Geographical Indications: the Yarra Valley wine region GI, for example, is
almost the same shape on a map as the country of the Wurundjeri people.
It seems to me that if vineyard owners and
winemakers in each region made an effort to find out whether there is or was a
local word that comes close to terroir - and then asked the original speakers
of that language for permission to use it - it could not only help to foster
reconciliation and create a greater joint pride in country, but also help
people tell their unique wine stories.
‘Yes!’ says Aunty Carolyn. ‘You’re talking
about the diversity of each of Australia’s lands. They are not all
the same. And the wines they produce aren’t all the same. They don’t all produce
bloody Yellow Tail.’
In Boon Wurrung language, she tells me, the
word ‘beek’ means country, as in land. In the same way that the Latin word ‘terra’
means country, as in land. But she doesn’t know of a Boon Wurrung word that
comes closer to the spirit of terroir. And she reminds me that, because it was
an oral tradition, never written down, much of the Boon Wurrung language is
lost.
‘But Boon Wurrung language is similar to
the language they speak in the Yarra Valley’ she says. ‘We share a lot of words
with the Wurundjeri people.’
---
Wurundjeri country covers what is now the
city of Melbourne and runs upriver into the land where the Yarra Valley
vineyards are now planted. One of the most famous Wurundjeri men was William
Barak, head man of his tribe, who was born before the white settlement of
Melbourne in 1835, and who died a couple of years after Federation.
During his later life, William Barak became
great friends with the de Pury family, then - as now - winegrowers in the heart
of the Yarra Valley. Around 1898, Barak made a painting of Samuel de Pury’s
vineyard - an astounding image of orderly vine rows nestled among plunging,
tree-covered hillsides.
Barak’s great, great niece is Professor Joy
Murphy Wandin, a respected Wurundjeri elder. When I visit her at her home in
Healesville to discuss Jeffrey Grosset’s ideas, she, too, immediately
understands. She, too, initially suggests a very similar word, bik: ‘It means
country, as in soil’. Then she shakes her head and pauses.
‘That word terroir,’ she says. ‘I reckon it
also means belonging to country: where the growth comes from. And that word in
our language would be ngooleek. Belonging. Sometimes there’s not a lot of
commonality between English and Aboriginal words. But I think this is close.’
Like her great, great uncle, Aunty Joy has
had some associations with local wine people: in the early 1990s, Yering
Station winery released a wine featuring Barak’s name and story, and came to
her to ask for permission and help.
‘I remember when they were developing the
Barak’s Bridge label,’ she says. ‘It was a nice connection - apart from the
simple courtesy of asking. Being able to acknowledge the original landowners
and the history on a wine label was quite special to me. It was as important as
if it was my own project. When I saw that Barak label, it gave me a great
enormous pride of belonging.’
Imagine if Yarra Valley grape growers and
winemakers were to adopt the word ngooleek as their own, unique local
expression of the concept of terroir.
‘Oh, it would be so good for my children to
be able to buy wine with language on it,’ says Aunty Joy. ‘Wurundjeri language
is so beautiful, and it’s not known. Language is the belonging of your culture.
It’s about who you are. It’s the voice of who you are. When I speak language,
it’s who I am.’
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(This is an extract from my book The Future
Makers, Australian wines for the 21st century, published 2010)
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UPDATE, 20 May 2013: All the way over on the other side of Australia, Margaret River winemaker, Rob Mann of Cape Mentelle, is also engaging with this idea. Read his thoughts about making wine in Wadandi Boodjar - 'ocean country' in Nyungar language - in the latest edition of Mentelle Notes.
