Sour grapes: Why your favourite ‘estate’ might not have a single vine

The rail trail runs from Tallarook to Yea, or further if you’re game. But a 40 kilometre pedal was plenty for us. We even paused halfway, a caffeine stop at Trawool Estate. Maybe the names ring a bell: Yea, Trawool. Back in January, both towns edged Victoria’s fires, prompting me to ask the barista, “Did the smoke affect your grapes the other month?”

“What grapes?” came her answer. I glanced around and couldn’t spot a vine. Call me prejudicial, but when I see “estate” in a rural setting, I think barrels and cellar doors. In short, grapes. Surely wine is integral to estate’s definition.

Dictionaries, however, back the barista. “A piece of landed property” is the Macquarie wording. The Collins underlines ownership, describing estate as “a large area of land in the country which is owned by a person, family or organisation”. State is a fraternal twin, as is status, all three terms embracing property, your station in life as well as terra firma.

So, no grapes then. Neither by law nor semantics, the fruit as much a cultural association in the same way most Europeans think swans are white by decree. Estate gets even messier, and far less idyllic, when coupled with council or industrial, real or residential. Making me wonder how far we can stretch the word before it loses its own properties?

Intrigued, I asked David Blair, editor of the Placenames gazette, for his take: “Trawool Estate is what I’d call an instance of ‘poncification’, a subspecies of real estate agents’ linguistic upmarketing”. For the record, the coffee was delicious and the panorama serene, but this was a matter of meaning.

David added, “I reckon there are only two respectable usages of estate in Australia. One is ‘a property with a large amount of land and a big house on it’ (and that’s of marginal use in Oz). While the second would be ‘a property where grapes are cultivated; a winery’.”

Seems this vineyard reflex is a widespread response, if not strictly justified to the letter. Images of tendrils and labels are what the brochures generate, those cinematic ads with Van Morrison soundtracks, priming the knee-jerk presumption, when really an estate can be the land itself.

Without wishing you alarm, grange is a similar shapeshifter. Years of shrewd marketing by the Penfolds people have trained us to envision pendant rows of shiraz bunches, tables as long as the lunches, when no fruit need be implicated. Despite deriving from granum, or grain in Latin, grange is free to be a square of God’s green earth, yeoman’s cottage optional. Just as farm can be an urbanite’s getaway sans tractor, sans cow, sans crop.

It’s a shock to the system, much like that Trawool espresso, a wake-up call warning us how much we colour words with our own beliefs. If I say pet, you fetch your family dog to mind, or cat, when I could be alluding to a turtle. Or a rock. In rhetoric, and in law, the burden rests in defining base terms, a test to see whether we’re debating the one unequivocal matter. Obeying the wrong hunch could spell sour grapes. Or worse, you may lose your estate.

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