Barossa Valley Tourism

Barossa Valley Tourism came to us not long after COVID with a campaign called Be Curious, and the interesting part of the brief was what it left out. No wine. Not a barrel, not a cellar door, not a row of vines at golden hour — which, given that’s roughly how the Barossa has been photographed for the past forty years.

The thinking made sense once they explained it. Everybody already knows what the Barossa is for, and if you’re twenty-five and not especially fussed about shiraz, that reputation isn’t an invitation so much as a closed door. So the campaign went looking for everything else, and over four days we followed it into areas such as a pottery studio, a leather workshop, a shearing shed and a restaurant kitchen with a pasta bench in it.

What I hadn’t expected was how much of it came down to hands. The brief talked about sights and smells and textures, and since you can’t photograph a smell you end up photographing the nearest available thing instead — clay going soft under someone’s thumbs, a piece of tan leather folded over to show how it moves, fingers working through a fleece on the wool table, green pasta coming off the roller. 

Kris Jenkinson ran film alongside the stills with Big D lighting the whole thing, which meant fairly technical setups in some genuinely awkward spaces, and it also meant nobody spent the week waiting on anybody else. 

The wine is still there, obviously. It just didn’t need our help.