Orange F.O.O.D. Week: celebrate wines and produce like a local
Orange and its neighbouring shires Cabonne and Blayney are known as the “food basket of NSW” - find out why.
Thirty years ago, the wider world knew Orange only as a town between Bathurst and Dubbo, in the NSW Central West a few hours from Sydney over the mountains. It was the birthplace of Banjo Paterson and the site of the first gold found in Australia, but those claims to fame weren’t cutting it against Bathurst’s car race and Dubbo’s zoo.
So one night some of the good burghers of Orange met for dinner to work out what their city’s “thing” should be. Presumably one of them, stumped for ideas, took a second helping and another glass of the excellent local food and wine, and thought: “Hang on … ”
Orange and its neighbouring shires Cabonne and Blayney have since been known as the “food basket of NSW” and are about to mark the 25th year of F.O.O.D. Week (that’s “Food of Orange District”), Australia’s oldest regional food festival, on this year from April 8-17.
Autumn may be the busiest and least convenient time for the producers, but it is also the season the locals enjoy most, with its bright blue skies and glorious golden leaves. It’s the perfect time to visit and ponder what we’re missing just a few hours away in Sydney and Canberra.
The food
The best place to find everything the region produces under one roof — fruit, beef, lamb, venison, cheese, bread, jams, etc — is The Agrestic Grocer, a shop and cafe run by Lucas and Danielle Martin and Beau and Katie Baddock. Named after the Greek word for rustic or unpolished, its owners insist it’s not hipster (sure, guys) but simply dedicated to fresh, regional food and locally roasted coffee. It’s a cheerful, sprawling barn of a place that also serves as a shopfront for the local Badlands Brewery and the Second Mouse Cheese Company, and as HQ for F.O.O.D. Week.
Venison is something we don’t see much of in Australia (and when you do, it’s often farmed venison from New Zealand), which is almost inexplicable, given it’s a lean, high-protein meat with good flavour. The Mandagery Creek Venison Farm Kitchen holds monthly lunches with a tour of the beautiful property over which deer range, hosted by the farmers Tim and Sophie Hansen (also a food writer who blogs at local-lovely .com). Now most of what they produce is exported; it’s hard, Tim says, for a small-scale farmer to meet the quantity and consistency requirements of a major retailer here, but they’re in talks with Harris Farm.
To experience the best that chefs can do with the local seasonal produce, there are some well-established upscale restaurants: Lolli Redini in Orange, serving contemporary Italian and French, and Tonic in nearby Millthorpe, a pretty gold rush-era village that bustles with visitors at the weekend. Locals consider Tonic’s chef Tony Worland solely responsible for restoring a pulse to the little town, with a host of cafes, cellar doors and boutique shops opening in Tonic’s wake.
The wine
Considered a distinct wine region since 1997, Orange’s elevation is key to its viticulture, with vineyards planted 600-1000m above sea level — conditions similar to those of Burgundy at its highest elevation, and Bordeaux a bit lower down. The soil is volcanic, the terroir about 650 million years old, and the climate is sunny with cold nights that slow the ripening process. The first vines were planted in the area by Germans not long after the town was settled in 1846, but the modern industry dates only from the 1980s.
The wines you’ll be most enthusiastically encouraged to sample include riesling (a revelation), chardonnay (it’s back, hold the oak), sauvignon blanc (more passionfruit than New Zealand’s peary style), pinot noir and, if you’re lucky, a prized zinfandel from Cargo Road Wines. Owner and winemaker James Sweetapple (also president of F.O.O.D. Week) is evangelistic about his farming methods, from the holistic management school promoted by environmentalist Allan Savory. Among the techniques is using grazing animals in fast rotation to redistribute nutrients across the property. The results speak, nay sing, for themselves.
Another cellar door to visit is the Slow Wine Co in Millthorpe — formerly Bantry Grove, but renamed to reflect the patient approach of owner Terrey Johnson and winemaker Will Rikard-Bell, who says he likes “not rushing it into the bottle, letting it do its own thing”. As well as cold-stabilising the wine over two winters, he is minimalist with additives and generally resists “stuffing around with the wine”. Slow Wine takes full advantage of not being too big to fail, experimenting with texture and creating flavours subtler than any you’ll find in your local bottle shop. A warning to drinkers of average wine: this visit will leave the mass-produced stuff all tasting like a sulfite-laden headache in a bottle.
The festival
This week in April celebrates food and wine in all their forms, with an emphasis on conviviality and sharing a meal with strangers. Events include a Night Market with communal tables; farm tours with foraged food that becomes your brunch, courtesy of The Agrestic Grocer; sourdough and cider-making workshops; winery tours; a truffle-hunting demonstration; the 100-Mile Dinner in Molong with food from the region’s best chefs; the Moveable Feast lunch, with canapes at Agrestic, entrees and mains at Mandagery Creek and dessert at the Farm Gate Orchard; and the F.O.O.D. Train, a weekend-long tour of the district departing from Sydney, with producers explaining how your food gets from paddock to plate.
But the event that sells fastest is FORAGE, a kind of moving degustation with food and wine stations along a 3.8km scenic walk starting from the beautiful Philip Shaw vineyard at Balmoral. It is based on the “Mangialonga” that James Sweetapple and his wife experienced in a town in Piedmont; dancing and singing is encouraged. It’s once a year only, with Sweetapple resisting the demand to hold it more often — for example, during Wine Week in October (when I suggest it be renamed Stations of the Quaff, he nods politely and moves on).
This year’s 1500 tickets are sold out but you can join the waitlist — and be prepared for next year.
The writer was a guest of Orange F.O.O.D. Week (April 8-17; orangefoodweek.com.au) and Destination NSW.