The Multiple Roles of the Australian Wine Show System

Abstract

The Australian wine show system aims to ‘better the breed’, raising Australian wine standards. It does this by supporting learning within the show system and influencing other systems in the sector more broadly. This study reports on the results of 63 interviews with a range of actors in the industry. The findings show wine shows influence learning about wine quality and saleability on multiple levels, and that their perceived legitimacy is a vital driver of the show system's effectiveness. Shows connect actors, provide a mechanism for learning and knowledge sharing and support wine marketing. This paper's main contribution is to show how wine shows act to influence a range of sectoral dynamics, both closely connected with wine shows and more distant factors such as labour markets and the research and education systems. The research shown in this paper shows up six roles for the Australian wine show system. The first four roles are, to some extant at least, well studied in the existing literature. The six roles are: 1) expert and independent judgement, 2) marketing and promotion, 3) winemaker learning, 4) social learning, 5) validation of winemakers and inputs, and 6) validation of innovations.

Keywords:

• wine shows
• learning
• Australia

Notes

I did not study this relationship and relied on the practitioners to tell me if they found such a relationship, and they said that they did.

Perhaps the classic Australian example of this was the introduction of stainless steel pressure fermentation tank winemaking technology in 1955 by Colin Gramp and his team for their Orlando Barossa Riesling, which won the Adelaide Wine Show the first prize for the best white wine, a first for a six-month-old wine (Rankine, 1996). Following this the technology was widely adopted.

The greatest example of shows influencing the market for Australian wine is that of Grange, which, after a dreadful start, started to dominate the show system and became the sole Australian wine of indubitably world class. This created a market for very high-quality Australian wine where none previously existed, and in so doing created an opening for other Australian winemakers to produce high-quality wines and have them accepted.