There was not a sour grape in sight - but there were plenty of bitter and angry winemakers and grape growers gathered on the McLaren Vale sporting oval on Sunday.
Several hundred local residents of the internationally renowned wine region converged on the oval with their farming equipment - predominantly tractors - to protest a planned new suburb at the entrance to the tourism drawcard.
Dudley Brown, chairman of the McLaren Vale Grape, Wine and Tourism Association, said the community-organised event was aimed at letting the government know residents were "completely fed up with inappropriate and unsympathetic development".
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The state government says the Seaford Heights development - which will inevitably proceed, is a distance from the wine region and would include appropriate buffers and screens, while locals say it will damage the ambience of the area and impact on farming activities, with several vineyards sharing boundaries with the development.
A spokesman for Minister for Urban Development and Planning Paul Holloway said the parcel of land had been zoned residential for the past 20 years and Mr Holloway was currently only considering updating that zoning to include supporting infrastructure for a new suburb.
"The land in question might be the most valuable undeveloped vineyard land in the world and we don't want to se it developed into gutter-to-gutter housing," Mr Brown told AAP.
"We think it will have an enormous impact on the industry because the industry is increasingly reliant on tourism and this land is the gateway to the second biggest tourism region in the state."
Paxton Wines owner David Paxton, who drove his 30-year-old tractor in the convoy, said the government was showing a "complete lack of sensibility" about the land, which borders his own property.
He said ultimately such a development would negatively impact the wine industry, as suburbia moved closer and closer to once rural land.
"It's just bracket creep if you like," Mr Paxton said.
"They're getting closer and closer and ultimately the developers will wear down councils and governments - God knows how they do it."
He said building housing estates next to farming areas always presented problems, with everything from bird scarers to people spraying and picking grapes at night.
John Harvey, whose family owns the Chalk Hill winery, also participated in the protest and said residential developments and farming practices did not mix.
"There are a lot of people that don't understand farming," he said.
"They are fearful of what we're doing - without justification - but there's some hysteria so that can cause problems for your general operation."
Peter Dawson, former chief wine maker with Hardys and current chairman of the Australian Wine Research Institute, said other famed wine regions of the world wouldn't even allow construction of a tin shed because they placed such a high value on the regional contributions.
"McLaren Vale has established itself as a world-class wine region and it has demonstrated it's ability to produce world-class wines and I think the integrity of the region should be preserved," he said.
Several hundred McLaren Vale locals and dozens of tractors made the slow journey of some 5km from the oval to Paxton Wines, where they spent the afternoon enjoying some of the famed local beverages and free entertainment.
Published in the Sydney Morning Herald
Nhada Larkin
October 31, 2010
