Becoming Pinot Noir: Assembling Regional Identity in Central Otago and Hemel-en-Aarde
Nikolai Siimes
This paper adopts an assemblage and marketization approach to understanding wine region identities. Taking identity as constructed and always in flux (in becoming), means tracing the messy process of (re)negotiation that wine producers, influencers, industry authorities, and the grapes and vines themselves enact. This paper explores the phenomenon of new world wine regions assembling a Regional Signature Grape Variety (RSGV), where one variety becomes synonymous with one place. To think this through, I compare two (globally) young wine regions and their encounters with Pinot Noir (PN): Central Otago (CO) in New Zealand and Hemel-en-Aarde (HeA) in South Africa. I draw on document review, ethnography, conversations with wine professionals, and personal lived experience as a winemaker/viticulturist. Tracing the contested positioning of PN as the RSGV in each example allows insight into how regional identities are constructed, the challenges of collective branding, and the materiality and agency of PN itself. In the case of CO, PN has been essential in constituting the place as a region (where both the popular understanding of where CO is and the boundaries of CO as a wine region far exceed the original local government area, e.g. including Arrowtown, Queenstown, and Wānaka). PN remains at the heart of their local wine-investment-tourism nexus. In HeA PN has had specific relations with the terroir, climate, and winemaking techniques that have created a wine assemblage quite different to the South African stalwarts like Stellenbosch. It is through—but also with and because of—PN that HeA has been able to position itself within the broader South Africa wine landscape. In both cases certain material configurations have afforded a particular enactment of identity that is both place-based and yet not entirely novel, resembling many other PN wine regions.
Nikolai Siimes is