A model for the identification of terrons in the Lower Hunter Valley, Australia

Abstract

Terroir in the Lower Hunter Valley – a prominent wine-producing region of Australia – is an appealing concept for landowners both in terms of enabling strategic land management and for positioning businesses favourably in a competitive consumer market. To those ends, preliminary steps are made in this study to establish common soil and landscape entities in the area using the terron concept that was proposed by Carré and McBratney (2005). Here soil and landscape variables were assembled and then used to generate 12 terrons or continuous soil-landscape units which are described quantitatively in terms of their distinguishing characteristics. Each terron is characterised by landscape variables (derived from a digital elevation model) and soil variables which include soil pH, clay percentage, soil mineralogy (clay types and presence of iron oxides), continuous soil classes, and presence or absence of marl. This study demonstrates a number of soil inferential techniques used for assembling the soil terron variables, based on common or easy to measure soil properties that populate most soil information databases. The approach is the first step in describing terroir; the next step will be to match the terrons with different grape varietals.