As tastes and trade change, so the proactive marketing department must reinvent its brands and what they might refer to as their “offering”. Writing in the International Journal of Globalisation and Small Business, a research team from Australia discusses how the once entirely desirable wines of the Hunter Valley region have now become part of a bigger gastronomic landscape to keep pace with trends and continue to sell their wines and other produce.
Sidsel Grimstad and Jennifer Waterhouse of the University of Newcastle, New South Wales and John Burgess of RMIT University in Melbourne, Victoria explain how resilience and transformation have been applied to create “a little bit of La Dolce Vita” in the region.
Hunter Valley is a small national producer but is, the researchers suggest, a strong custodian of the region’s wine identity. “The importance of having regional identity ‘custodians’ such as the old wine families that ensure that the landscape maintains the rural aesthetic, creates embedded institutions that benefit both old and new entrants,” the team writes. They add that “new entrants may be considered a risk, they also provide a continuous stream of creative solutions and investments, leading to continuous improvement of quality and luxury provision of wine and gastronomy sensory experiences.”
The team’s case study shows that wine-tourism in the Hunter Valley region is strong and more resilient because it has regenerated itself into a gastronomic landscape where lifestyle, food, wine, and tourism complement each other, the team says. “Through this, the Hunter Valley manages to maintain its lead among the top Australian destinations for both national and international wine and food tourists,” they conclude.
Grimstad, S., Waterhouse, J. and Burgess, J. (2019) ‘‘Creating a little bit of La Dolce Vita’. Explaining resilience and transformation in the Hunter Valley wine region, NSW, Australia’, Int. J. Globalisation and Small Business, Vol. 10, No. 4, pp.359–380.