Tanunda

The valley is the country of the Peramangk people, with Ngadjuri lands to the north. In 1837 Colonel William Light, South Australia's first Surveyor-General, named the Barossa Range after Barrosa in Spain, where he had fought as a young officer; a clerical error fixed the spelling as Barossa. The first German-speaking Lutherans reached the colony from Prussia in 1838, having left home over restrictions on their form of worship, with their passage backed by the colonist George Fife Angas. Bethany, laid out in 1842 just south-east of the present town, was their first village in the valley; Langmeil followed in 1843, and the surveyed township of Tanunda grew up beside it. The name is generally explained as an Aboriginal word for a waterhole.

The settlers divided their land into Hufendorf strips, a narrow house block on the road with a long field running back from it, a pattern still legible around Bethany. Vines arrived quickly: Johann Gramp planted beside Jacob's Creek in 1847, and by the end of the century the valley was shipping fortified wine to Britain. Lutheran congregations argued and divided, which is why several churches stand within a few streets of each other.

The First World War brought suspicion of German Australians, the closing of German-language schooling and the renaming of German place names: Langmeil became Bilyara and Bethanien became Bethany, though Tanunda's Aboriginal name survived. From the 1960s the valley turned from fortified wine to table wine and then to tourism, and its century-old shiraz vines became its best-known asset.

Tanunda is the most visibly German of the Barossa towns. Lutheran churches stand within walking distance of one another, a legacy of nineteenth-century doctrinal splits, and their cemeteries record the same family names that appear on cellar-door labels: Gramp, Seppelt and Lehmann. Brass bands and Liedertafel singing societies came with the settlers, and the town band, formed in the nineteenth century, still plays at civic occasions and at the vintage parade.

The Barossa Vintage Festival, first held in 1947 and now run in odd-numbered years, is the valley's great gathering: winery events, long lunches, a parade and harvest customs brought from Germany. Wine shapes the year in quieter ways too, with pruning through the cold months, the round-the-clock crush of autumn, and a convention by which the person driving does the spitting.

German words have stayed in local speech and on menus: kuchen for a fruit or custard tart, streuselkuchen under its crumble, mettwurst, and the South Australian fritz. Australian rules football and netball fill winter Saturdays, and the valley's clubs draw supporters from the surrounding farms. Visitors are expected to be unhurried and to talk to whoever is pouring, and many cellar doors are staffed by people whose families have grown the fruit for generations. Aboriginal connection to the valley is acknowledged more openly than it once was, in place names and at public occasions.

About 4,700 people live in Tanunda, and roughly 25,000 in the Barossa Council area as a whole, which also takes in the larger commercial centre of Nuriootpa and the smaller Angaston. The town has grown steadily as the valley has become a weekend destination and as Adelaide's northern edge has crept closer.

Wine runs through the local economy from end to end: growing, contract crushing, bottling, cooperage, labelling and cellar-door hospitality, along with grain and sheep on the drier ground, smallgoods making, and a tourism trade that fills the streets from Friday to Sunday. Many residents commute to Gawler or to Adelaide's northern suburbs, and hospitals, schools and aged-care homes in the valley towns are among the biggest employers.

The working year follows the vines. Pruning runs through winter, canopy work fills spring, and from February to April vintage takes over, with night harvesting, queues of trucks and an influx of seasonal labour. Housing costs have risen as city buyers and holiday letting compete for the valley's cottages, and keeping young people in the district is a recurring worry. Water is the long-term problem: the Barossa is dry, irrigation water has to be brought in from outside the valley, and hotter summers and earlier harvests are changing how the vineyards are managed.

Barossa cooking is German farm food adapted to a hot, dry country. Butchers make mettwurst, a coarse smoked sausage eaten cold in slices, along with lachsschinken, a smoked pork loin, and the pink luncheon meat South Australians call fritz. Bakeries sell kuchen, a yeast-dough tart filled with fruit or set custard, streuselkuchen under a crumble, bienenstich, pretzels and pies. Preserving is a habit here: dill cucumbers, quince paste, plum jam and pickled pork.

Wine is the point of the place. Shiraz from vines well over a century old is the Barossa's signature, dark and full-bodied; grenache and mataro, the grape known elsewhere as mourvedre, go into blends; semillon is the traditional white; and the cooler Eden Valley on the eastern hills is riesling country. Seppeltsfield, west of the town, keeps a barrel of fortified tawny from every year since 1878. Tasting is informal and conversational, and a nominated driver is the usual arrangement.

Modern Barossa cooking owes much to Maggie Beer, whose restaurant near Nuriootpa built a reputation in the 1980s and 1990s on local pheasant, quince and verjuice, the unfermented juice of unripe grapes. Weekend produce markets in the valley towns gather growers, bakers and smallgoods makers, and olives, almonds and stone fruit all come from the surrounding hills.