Other
Joanna Simon
Wine authority
- Discipline
- Other
i. Biography
In food writing, memory can work like a sensory map: place enters through taste, scent, and atmosphere, then stays there long after the visit is over. Joanna Simon’s line about the Barossa Valley does that work in a single sentence. It treats eating as the means by which a landscape is stored and later recalled.
In Their Words “I have two abiding food memories from visits to the Barossa Valley around the turn of the century.” “Abiding” matters here. It points to duration, not novelty. In Joanna Simon’s phrasing, the Barossa Valley is remembered through food first, which says something about how the region registers for a writer attentive to what lingers: the texture of a meal, the atmosphere around it, the way a table can hold a place in the mind more firmly than a view. A food memory can carry temperature, scent, and setting; it can make a region feel fixed in the body rather than merely observed. Simon’s sentence suggests that the Barossa Valley around the turn of the century did not pass as background. It entered the record as experience. For a writer working in wine and food, that is a useful distinction. Some places are described; others are retained. Simon’s note belongs to the second category, where taste becomes a durable form of geography and a single remembered meal can stand in for a larger sense of place.
FAQ Since 2010, Joanna Simon has been a columnist for the Alsace Wines website, bringing her voice to a specialist readership with steady authority and style.
Profile updated July 2026
