Sustaining the success of the Barossa GI Zone: Scenario workshop

Abstract

Sustaining the success of the Barossa GI Zone: Scenario workshop

Summary

Background

The main purpose of this project was to elicit people’s visions for the future of the Barossa Valley landscape to 2025, and to determine to what extent these visions were shared between different stakeholder types.

Procedure

A one-day workshop was held in September 2004 at Angaston, with 20 people attending.

Most of them were connected with the wine industry, and with agencies related to the maintenance of the Barossa landscape, such as local governments. The workshop activities involved selecting and voting on a wide range of images of the Barossa. Most of these were visual, but the workshop also used brief narratives and several other means of helping respondents determine their preferred visions of the Barossa’s future. To help participants organize their thoughts, the workshop considered four aspects:

1. What exists in the Barossa now, and should be retained?
2. What exists in the Barossa now, and should be eliminated?
3. What does not exist in the Barossa now, and should be introduced?
4. What does not exist in the Barossa now, and should not be introduced?

Findings

The key finding was that there was a very high level of agreement among participants about preferred Barossa landscapes. Strong preferences were expressed

• for a semi-rural type of landscape, mixing urban, vineyard, and natural land use.
• for many small towns rather than a few large ones
• for the traditional “relaxed hospitality” values of the Barossa
• but for these to be extended from home-based into service quality
• against the Barossa becoming effectively an outer suburb of Adelaide
• against intensive tourism of the type found in places such as Hahndorf.