Pursuing quality and resisting commodification : an analysis of value creation among Clare Valley family wine businesses

Abstract

In this thesis I show how family-based enterprises, in producing and marketing fine wine, both resist and embrace a deepening of commodity relations with a wider commercial market for wine. In attempting to create increased and enduring economic value from wine that is by definition small in volume and distinctive in style, winemakers are engaged in crucial, yet often conflicting relationships: with wine grape growers, the wine-buying public, and with other winemaking enterprises.

The production of wine requires the ongoing application of a great deal of specialised knowledge and skills to the physical environment. The reproduction of the family enterprises through which the production of fine wine typically occurs demands the successful combination of family and business roles, and a calibration of domestic and commercial cycles. But above all, it is an exercise in value creation. Firstly, it is an exercise that results in particular products that can command high market values. It is also, though, an exercise in which grape growers, and winemakers value the work that they perform, the land that underpins their production, and the relationships that are shared with peers, the wine-buying public, and the family members upon which the survival of many wine and grape enterprises depends.

These relationships that are central to this type of value-added production, whereby value can be 'added' above and beyond production costs, is one that promises a raft of undisputed benefits, in particular less demand on scarce environmental resources and more diverse livelihoods for rural areas and communities. These relationships, however, have received scant policy or ethnographic attention. In seeking to redress this oversight, I take the chain of production of fine wine by family-based enterprises from a discrete viticultural region, South Australia's Clare Valley, as my particular ethnographic focus. This enables me to explore the sustainability of the social relationships and business enterprises on which valued-added agriculture depends, in light of my central concern that such businesses both require and need to resist the deepening of commodity relations. Key anthropological tools including kinship, the household, political economy and agrarian ecology, are applied to this ethnographic material, so that an anatomy of ongoing adaptations to current and pending economic, social and ecological challenges to Australian agriculture can be drawn. This is crucial to the reinvigorating a policy debate about the sustainability of Australia's rural futures, and the family enterprises that comprise it.

I consider the place of such fine wine enterprises as that of the Clare Valley in relation to the professed need to develop economic alternatives to the dominant Australian model of mass agricultural production and marketing of low-value, high-volume grains, wool and beef. This model of agricultural production has become increasingly untenable as Australia faces increased competition from other economies and the environmental costs incurred by such agriculture become harder to externalise. Show more