It might be the off-season, but Tasmania is on trend

Foraged mushrooms are having a moment in Tasmania, where a surprising feast turns out to be a highlight of this traveller's food-focused island getaway.

Of all the places in all of Tasmania, a pine forest near Hobart airport is the last place you’d expect to devour a magical feast.

Yet here I am, lounging in a camp chair and watching Mic Giuliani – forager extraordinaire – expertly twirl mushroom-coated pappardelle into towering piles for his hungry guests. The restaurant-worthy dish, served on a practical enamel plate, is one of six courses (including dessert) featuring mushrooms, and expertly matched with delicious wines from nearby Bream Creek Vineyard.

The feast includes the fruits (or, to be precise, fungi) of our labours. We’ve spent several extremely pleasant hours – under a sky as blue as Giuliani’s twinkling eyes – wandering through the forest as trainee foragers. It doesn’t take long before we learn to spot the little upheavals of pine needles that indicate a mushroom has sprouted from the sandy forest floor (we’re so close to the ocean we can hear waves crashing).

Foraged mushrooms on the Sirocco South tour. Picture: Katrina Lobley

Using a curved mushroom knife fitted with a brush at one end, we gather the edible ’shrooms (mostly slippery jacks that have a slimy cap and butter-yellow spongy underside), flick off clinging debris and add them to baskets that we eventually deliver to Giuliani’s mobile kitchen.

If this is Tasmania’s “off-season”, I’m here for it. The Apple Isle is making a virtue of its chilly winter temperatures and promoting a raft of wildly memorable experiences such as those offered by Giuliani’s business, Sirocco South.

Mic Giuliani, foodie and forager extraordinaire of Sirocco South. Picture: Katrina Lobley

It’s not the only delicious experience that surpasses expectations. Sullivans Cove is a distillery that’s garnered global awards such as World’s Best Single Malt Whisky. With its industrial setting near the airport and plain black exterior, the premises don’t promise much.

Yet thanks to a clever interior redesign by Melbourne’s Studio Y, you’ll find – following your distillery tour – a warm, inviting tasting area that resembles a private club. Here, among amber-toned glass side tables and dialled-down mood lighting, you find the highly coveted spirits you’re swirling in your tasting glasses perfectly match their surrounds. Abracadabra. It’s a kind of magic.

The tasting room at Sullivans Cove Distillery.

Certainly, gluttons will wish they could wave a wand to make the calories disappear. For how on earth are you supposed to exert willpower when confronted by the delectable bites served up in Hobart and surrounds? We don’t even think of our waistlines as we settle in for an afternoon of Scottish-skewed haute fare at Oirthir (pronounced or-heer, the Scots Gaelic word means “coast”). The fine-diner, with bucolic views of a grazing Friesian dairy herd and distant Maria Island, has taken over the minimalist Bream Creek site that formerly housed the much-lauded restaurant Van Bone.

If wineries are your thing, point your wheels towards Tolpuddle Vineyard. Its striking glass-walled cellar door is an easy 4.5km toddle if you’re staying in Georgian splendour at Prospect Country House in Richmond. A more casual experience is found at Frogmore Creek Cellar Door and Restaurant, part of the Coal River Valley wine region. Here, you can lunch on extremely local oysters with ponzu and yuzu gel or seared scallops with a Thai chilli dressing while trying a trio of wines.

The picturesque Tolpuddle Vineyard. Picture: Jessica Clark

Food lovers who stick to downtown Hobart are also spoilt for choice. Staying at The Tasman or the ultra-low-lit MACq 01? You can probably skip lunch after feasting on the hotels’ breakfast buffets (MACq’s sublime spread includes tiny canelés – darkly caramelised eggy pastries invented in France).

Once your appetite returns at dinnertime, snuggle into cosy Pitzi Pasta Bar for truffle-flecked tagliatelle or find a perch in the igloo-white space of Institut Polaire for moreish bites such as bottarga toast, scallop sashimi and whisky caramel tart.

How to work it all off? Hobart’s got you. Hike the Platypus Trail alongside the Hobart Rivulet. Keep your eyes peeled for the resident monotremes as you close in on the World Heritage-listed Cascades Female Factory. As part of the Off Season, the mostly open-air site is running a thought-provoking tour called Condemned (Saturdays until August 30) on which visitors are challenged to decide if they think four women convicts should have met their fate on the gallows.

Hobart's storytelling hotel, MACq 01.

At the waterfront MACq 01, a “storytelling” hotel with colourful tales featured outside 114 guest rooms, learn more gruesome history from a storyteller such as Aaron Cuneo. He will talk you through some of the notable people featured on guest room doors – but outside the hotel his stories turn darker as he points out the spot where gallows once stood and a nearby hotel room with a crooked window frame. Visibly embedded in its interior walls, he says, are red and blonde locks shaved from the heads of female convicts.

With such a harsh and brutal history, it’s no wonder Tassie is now unafraid to embrace winter weirdness. It challenges visitors to push themselves right out of their warm comfort zones. On Kuuma sauna boat, for instance, moored at Margate, a 30-minute drive south of Hobart, you can alternate between the intense heat emanating from the embers of Coal River Valley stringybark and the gasp-inducing chill of the saltwater. Bring friends if you need peer pressure to go through with the extreme hot-cold experience and one, two, three… jump!

The author was a guest of Tourism Tasmania.

Kuuma sauna boat near Hobart. Picture: Nina Hamilton/Kuuma

GOING OFF

Tasmania’s off-season, which runs until the end of August, includes offers on accommodation, attractions, tours, tastings and more. Visit the website for deals. 

OFF LUNCHING

Sirocco South’s Off Season forage and six-course forest lunch costs $330. The company also sells gourmet goodies at Hobart’s Farm Gate Market on the first and third Sundays of the month. 

OFF TASTING

Taste wines at Tolpuddle Vineyard (by appointment) and Frogmore Creek, or whisky at Sullivans Cove.  

NODDING OFF

Prospect Country House is on Richmond’s outskirts; The Tasman, a Luxury Collection Hotel, is a few steps from Hobart’s waterfront; MACq 01’s themed storytelling tours are free for in-house guests and those at Henry Jones Art Hotel, or $35 for non-guests (not recommended for children under 12).

Originally published as It might be the off-season, but Tasmania is on trend