- Title
- Drinking history: enjoying wine in early colonial New South Wales
- Creator
- McIntyre, Julie; Germov, John
- Relation
- Eat history p. 120-142
- Relation
- Food and drink in Australia and beyond
- Relation
- http://www.cambridgescholars.com/eat-history-14
- Publisher
- Cambridge Scholars Press
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2013
- Description
- Late in 1787 when the First Fleet docked at the Cape of Good Hope to take on supplies, the appointed lieutenant-governor of the new colony of New South Wales visited Constantia, the estate which made a highly prized wine of the period. David Collins' pleasure in tasting this "most excellent cordial" at its place of production resonated with his perception of the then Dutch colony of the Cape as "the abode of a civilized people", in contrast with Botany Bay, where he was destined and which he thought to be "the residence of savages". Almost a century after Collins' wine tasting at Constantia, University of Sydney's Foundation Professor of Chemistry, John Smith, wrote of his joy in drinking a colonial Hunter Valley red during a voyage on the Nile. Smith declared it to be his "rare privilege to introduce the wine of Australia for the first time to the notice of the Pharaohs ... to bring face to face the results of the newest [European] and oldest [Mediterranean] civilisations of the globe". Grape wine, "civilisation" and high culture have long been connected in the British elite mind. This is in contrast with a popular tradition of wineconsumption in European wine lands such as France. Indeed, "wine culture" as high culture is, in contemporary France, "essentially an elite phenomenon". Britain's wine culture was transported to New South Wales with Collins and other colonial elites, and then adapted by a modest number of wine lovers in succeeding colonial generations. Albeit a small feature of colonial culture, the emergence of wine production, distribution and consumption complicates the history of alcohol in early Australia as dominated by the consumption, and at times, overconsumption of spirits and beer. It contributes an understanding too, of Australian wine culture, within an emerging humanities and social science field of wine studies.
- Subject
- wine; colonial New South Wales; spirits; alcohol
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1341535
- Identifier
- uon:28764
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781443849173
- Language
- eng
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