Abstract
The paper examines one of Australia's most successful luxury hospitality
businesses, Peppers Hotel Trust. It focuses on the Trust's flagship
property The Convent at Peppertree a hotel, restaurant and winery
complex located in the heart of Pokolbin in the Hunter Valley of
New South Wales, Australia's most visited wine-tourism district.
Against the familiar economic accounts which frame Peppertree as
a valuable piece of real estate and the product of an unerring entrepreneurial
vision, it is recast here as a more precarious network in which the
complex threads from which it is woven are simultaneously social
and material; configured by the intimate social relations of marriage,
friendship and business partnerships and the material fabric of buildings
and gardens, wines and foodstuffs through which these relations take
and hold their shape. We trace three pathways through the Peppertree
network - the social relations of the business `partnership', the
`Convent' building which anchors the business in place; and the `gastronomic
landscape' from which the restaurant at Peppertree sources local
produce. These pathways open up some of the multifarious ways in
which knowledge and agency are distributed through the network and
enable us to admit new possibilities for financial story-telling;
the spatial complications of production and consumption and the situatedness
of our own research practice and account.
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