One of the most surprising and controversial decisions in its short history was handed down on Wednesday May 10 by the Geographical Indications Committee when it excluded Petaluma Ltd’s Sharefarmers Vineyard from the ‘final determination’ for the wine region of Coonawarra. This final determination, which is likely to go to appeal based on previous statements by the Petaluma’s chairman, Brian Croser, follows seventeen years of dispute which began with Petaluma’s purchase in 1983 of the land to the immediate north of the commonly accepted limits of the Coonawarra region. It also follows what appeared at the time to be a recent ‘win’ to Petaluma, after Brian Croser had presented fresh geological evidence to the GIC after the interim decision on the Coonawarra border had excluded Sharefarmers. The GIC had initially looked favourably on this evidence and were apparently close to including the vineyard. Also excluded from the new Coonawarra border are several very large vineyard developments to the west, southwest, southeast and northeast of the region, including vineyards developed by Peter Rymill and the reasonably well-known St Marys vineyard. Guy Darling, the GIC’s Presiding Member on this issue, said to OnWine that the new northern boundaries closely follow that of the interim determination, while the northeastern boundary follows the natural border presented by the Naracoorte Ranges, where Coonawarra shares a border with Wrattonbully (which at one stage looked likely to be called ‘Koppamurra’). The southern border, he says, has been designed to remove the land away from the terra rossa strip of Coonawarra from the GI. At the same time that the final determin-ation was made for Coonawarra, the GIC also made interim determinations for the two adjoining regions of Wrattonbully and Penola. While I have no problem whatsoever with the concept of a Penola region, I can’t help feeling that using the name of Wrattonbully is like attaching a hundredweight pair of concrete slippers to a potentially high quality wine region. Let me quote from the latest issue of the newsletter produced by the Circle of Wine Writers in London and its editor Jim Budd: ‘Sadly we didn’t have time to visit Rat’n’Bully the new up and coming Australian wine region, which is close to Coonawarra and is believed to be named after a chain of theme pubs’. I rest my case.
