Maxwell Winery in McLaren Vale, SA
A LITTLE north of McLaren Vale township, as the vine-clad slope begins to steepen, the golden stone and glinting glass of a modern architectural dream come into view.
A LITTLE north of McLaren Vale township, as the vine-clad slope begins to steepen, the golden stone and glinting glass of a modern architectural dream come into view.
Other cellar doors in the region may have more space, more history, more visitors, but it's doubtful any makes a stronger first impression as the home of Maxwell Wines (the name is emblazoned across the front in large letters if you're in doubt).
Up close, the scale and ambition of the structure becomes clearer. Great wedges of rock have been sliced from the hillside so the building can slot neatly in over three different levels, complete with carpark, patio and gardens.
Inside, the cellar door is centred around an impressive fireplace with sofas and a rug.
A tasting bench is at one end, where you can also look down through a glass wall to the workings of the winery with its open fermenters, hoses and steel tanks.
To the other, behind the fireplace, is a small dining space with views out along the rows of bare vines that seem to form a mystical pathway to the hazy ranges in the distance.
The room is smartly turned out, with white tablecloths, elegant chairs and an eyecatching light fitting. In the mid-winter sunshine, its limestone walls and varnished ceiling are aglow in gorgeous tones of treacle and honey. Sitting there, looking over the vines, it's easy to make comparisons with another cellar-door restaurant with similar views, just up the road.
D'Arry's Verandah has long been the benchmark for this type of development and it would be surprising if the team here did not take a close look at it when making their own restaurant plans.
Perhaps that sort of aspiration is behind an ambitious menu structure that includes standard a la carte as well as a "quartet" of wine-matched tasting dishes, none appearing on the main list.
While the restaurant seats only 30, serving all this in a timely fashion, from a kitchen that, from the outside at least, looks tight on space, would have the most experienced chefs reach for the cooking wine.
That's the challenge young couple Ben Doublet and Haley Masse have taken on and, without being unkind, it's fair to say they haven't completely mastered it.
The make their lives more difficult by the complexity of some dishes and their risky choice of bedfellows that wouldn't normally be put together. The slippery texture of strips of wakame (Japanese seaweed) work surprisingly well in a French bouillabaisse with a powerful blast of salty sea flavour, crab meat, scallop pucks and a large greenlip mussel that I'd rather was the smaller local variety. But I can't get my head around lamb shank braised in goji berry tea with pumpkin, kale and black bean couscous, or chicken breast with maple honey and haloumi and citrus butter, which we don't try.
The most successful dishes, particularly in this lunchtime winery environment, are also the simplest. A plate of whole king prawns, butterflied open and grilled with chermoula, aren't the biggest going around, but they are deliciously juicy. Presenting the prawns still in shell wins points and the tail meat lifts out easily and has the sweet, unctuous flavour so often missing when they are stripped bare before cooking.
And while the rice in a frypan of paella has started to disintegrate a little, the dark, toasted grains carry huge, complex flavour, and the accompanying seafood seems handled well enough.
Resources are also stretched on the floor. One likeable and efficient waitress looks after us well when we are the first to arrive, but she would have to be Superwoman to keep up on her own when the room fills half an hour later and the orders fly thick and fast. As a result, tables are ignored, wine continually arrives after the food and, in the end, our glasses are taken (by someone from cellar door) when there is still something left in the bottle.
Admittedly, I have made her life harder by being the only one at the table to order the quartet, despite warnings that it is best eaten with everyone in unison. The four courses start with a jerusalem artichoke pottage (let's just say soup) that is deep brown, rich and satisfying, with enough flavour nuances to hold my interest to the last scrape. The soup deserves a better fate than to be served in a black plastic ashtray, with "cigars" of chewy, salty pancetta, smeared with goat cheese, slotted in the cigarette rests. It looks even more naff than it sounds.
A ravioli of "wood-fired bug tail" is a single square envelope of pasta that is too thick and leaden, drenched in a rich seafood butter and topped with slices of shitake and pickled scallop. The filling is definitely seafood, but I can't pick the wood fire or that it's bug meat.
Then comes a "duck shank" that has been braised in an Asian stock, then roasted to a deep purple glaze. The meat peels easily from the bones and tastes fine but an overly sweet Thai dressing doesn't work with it or the matched wine.
The Maxwell's signature Ellen Street Shiraz is better served by the final dish, a pie of beef cheek with a chocolate and stout sauce that is again slightly on the sweet side. The cheek has been cooked long and slow, until disintegrating into long threads of meat. An occasional black bean gives a nice, mealy contrast.
By now, 2 1/2 hours after we arrived, the rest of the table is sharing dessert, a pastry disc covered with wedges of nicely-caramelised apples that would be even better without the peel.
"Perfection is lots of little things done well," Marco Pierre White quoted on his recent MasterChef appearance.
That's the key for the young chefs at Maxwell. Even if it means putting their grander ambitions on hold for a while.
HOW IT RATED: MAXWELL WINERY (Corner Olivers and Chalk Hill roads, McLaren vale; ph 8323 8200)
Food: 12/20
Staff: 6/10
Drink: 3/5
X-Factor: 4/5
Value: 6/10
The total score out of 50: 31