No Penola GI leaves grape-growing community nameless

When you hear that an Australian vineyard’s tourist sign has been used as target practice for a high-powered rifle as well as being peppered with shotgun blasts, it sounds more like something out of a spaghetti western than a standoff over boundaries and names of wine regions. But that’s exactly the case with a debate that’s raging over Coonawarra and Penola.

The issue goes back to 2000 when the Geographical Indications Committee (GIC), the statutory committee that determines Australian wine regions, proposed Penola as a GI to resolve all the regions in the immediate vicinity of Coonawarra. Four years later, a number of growers in the area successfully appealed to have the Coonawarra region extended to include their vineyards. This put the town of Penola within the GI of Coonawarra. So when the GIC came to making a final determination on a Penola wine region earlier this year, the Coonawarra Vignerons Association and the Coonawarra Grapegrowers Association objected to it on the basis that, because it didn’t include the town, it would be confusing and open to misuse. As a result, the GIC decided not to allow it.

This has left 14 grape growers and wine makers in the Penola community unable to use the name Coonawarra, which they were able to do until the boundaries for that region were finalised in 2002, and now no longer able to use Penola on their wine labels.

One such grower is Barry Mulligan of St Mary’s Vineyard, whose tourist sign, with Penola as its regional identity, was full of bullet holes within days of it being installed and shotgun blasts within weeks. Such is the intensity of feeling over the issue, which Barry says leaves them ‘excommunicated’.

To try and resolve the situation, these growers have written to the Federal Minister for Agriculture, as well as the Commonwealth Ombudsman and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, asking for an investigation. They don’t believe the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation Act ‘can be interpreted and applied in such as manner that isolates and disenfranchises fellow grape growers and winemakers’.

The investigation in still in progress. In the meantime, Barry and his fellow Penola community grape growers are left with no regional identity and only allowed to label their wines with the broad zone name Limestone Coast.