Australia’s Pinot Noir Mothervine (MV6): Creating Historical Capital in a Settler-Colonial Wine Industry

Julie McIntyre

julie.mcintyre@newcastle.edu.au

There is a wine bar in Kaurna Country/Adelaide, South Australia, called Mothervine. As the bar’s website stated in 2021, its name refers to “the noble ‘Australian’ Pinot Noir clone MV6 (Mother Vine 6, via Mount Pleasant, via the James Busby Collection, via Clos Vougeot).” This statement encapsulates that narratives about contemporary MV6 clones entangle claims that signify a desirable lineage. MV6 purportedly has connections with the Bourgogne, a French wine place identified with exceptional Pinot Noir. In addition to this it is associated with two of the most celebrated men in the Australian wine industry: Busby, an early nineteenth century wine industry advocate, and Maurice O’Shea, a mid-twentieth century vinegrower and winemaker at Mount Pleasant in Wonnarua Country/the Hunter Valley, New South Wales. This paper traces the construction of this combination of factors in MV6’s identity as a bestowing of historical capital on wines made from grapevines at Mount Pleasant, the property from which the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) collected vine stock to propagate the MV6 clone, and other places. The CSIRO began to distribute MV6 to growers in 1971. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, narratives about the venerable heritage of MV6 have appeared in marketing and journalism. This is mainly in relation to Mount Pleasant wines, but also to Pinot Noir at other properties that planted MV6 from the CSIRO. I will argue that the paradox of the Mothervine identity – the simultaneous embrace of Australia’s strengths in scientific viticulture and the evocation of noble birth and mother earth implied in ancestry comprising O’Shea, Busby and the vineyards of Clos Vougeot – uses history, myth and science to achieve a post-terroirist symbol of locality as a marker of distinction.   

Julie McIntyre has published widely on the history of winegrowing in Australia’s economy, society, culture and environments, with a particular focus on New South Wales.  She seeks to understand the relationship between wine production, trade and consumption through multiple lenses of research. Her most recent book, Hunter Wine: A history (2018, with John Germov) received a 2019 Special Mention for History from the OIV. In 2019 she undertook an Australia-American Fulbright Program at the Shields Library, University of California (Davis) to study the career of grape scientist Harold Olmo. Her most recent journal articles are: Connecting Australian First Nations' Histories with Settler Colonial Winegrape Cultivation, Journal of the Canadian Historical Association (2023); Women as Decision-makers in the Australian Wine Industry, 1960s - 1990s', Asia-Pacific Economic History Review (2024); and Bulk Wine from Big Water in a Dry Land, Environmental History (2024).