Tasting Australia: eat, drink and be merry
The best of our produce will be on show in South Australia.
The smell of pork roasting and crackling dripping over a fire pit wafting through the city. Gin botanicals being mixed by amateurs. Weekend walks through vineyards in the Barossa Valley followed by long table lunches. Picking and pickling olives on the Fleurieu Peninsula.
The national food and wine festival favoured by gourmands, Tasting Australia, will have plenty to offer when it kicks off in Adelaide and surrounding regions on Sunday, including an expanded drinks program featuring the best of gin and other spirits, cider, beer and wine production from coast to coast.
The eight-day program, whose food components are created and curated by Simon Bryant and Jock Zonfrillo and beverages by Michael and Margie Andrewartha, will include a focus on indigenous food for the first time and a greater city feel for wine matching foods; regions including the Riverland and Yorke Peninsula; and cooking with fire.
While last year’s event highlighted provenance, nose to tail cuisine and the importance of grains, wine will star this year, celebrating Adelaide being named one of 10 international Great Wine Capitals.
Andrewartha — who, as a co-owner of East End Cellars, is a wholesaler, retailer, producer and industry veteran — says the premier gourmet festival should have wine as a central feature in the city, and not just growing regions, because of its significance to South Australia’s cultural heritage and economic growth.
“It’s a bit part of our state and it’s a big export industry for us, and attracts a lot of people here,” Andrewartha says. “We have an obligation to promote the state and represent every local pocket and provide a program that suits every palate and price.”
The city wine component will include masterclasses with winemakers such as German riesling king Egon Muller; the Spirits of Australia meet the distillers event; 10 years of basket press tastings with Rockford Wines founder Robert O’Callaghan; Cider Sunday; a decade of Wendouree wines; and daily tastings.
There will be 75 gins, beers and ciders featured, 50 winemakers involved, and 250 varieties or wine on offer to sample.
The regional wine component includes an underground tour of Saltram Wine Estate in the Barossa; a discovery tour through McLaren Vale; Heroine’s Soul to Glass, featuring the leading ladies of wine, brewing and distilling; and Taras Ochota’s Fresh Wine Disco, where participants can taste wines straight out of the barrel while DJs spin tunes.
The most expensive event, for those without budgetary pressures, is the Grange Experience — six vintages across six decades from the 1960s — costing $950.
Muller, who has been named in the top 10 winemakers in the world several times and in 2015 won the international Winemakers’ Winemaker Award, visits South Australia annually for vintage, and produces Kanta Riesling for Andrewartha.
The modest German, who grew up in his family’s 200-year-old vineyards, says he is coming to Tasting Australia to learn, not teach.
While riesling may seem an old-fashioned drop, Muller says its popularity is ascending after a two-decade slump. He says having wine as a focus of a culinary event is essential.
“In France, Italy or Spain a meal is not a proper meal without wine,” Muller says. “In China or India we are trying very hard to make wine a part of the culinary experience although traditionally it is not. Australia is a melting pot of cultures and a great wine-producing country, so I guess a culinary festival wouldn’t be a festival without wine.”
O’Callaghan, 69, founded Rockford Wines more than 30 years ago and has just finished his 52nd vintage. He basket presses his reds for those who like traditional wines, and will be talking about his history and philosophies at the festival.
“By the time I started making my own wine I sat down and wanted to ensure the best of the Australian traditional wine period was not lost,” O’Callaghan says. “Basket pressing is like cooking a one-off meal as opposed to going out for a takeaway. There’s no criticism, it’s a reality. We choose to do it differently.”
O’Callaghan’s methods embody what Tasting Australia is about: people, the way they produce, and the heart and soul they put into their craft.
Food, of course, is also a feature of Tasting Australia. Town Square, in central Adelaide, will look out to the city. Fire pits for cooking and gathering around will be scattered around the edges. There will be glass houses for dinners and masterclasses, and a hall for tastings and socialising.
Zonfrillo, who has worked in Michelin-starred restaurants and runs Orana and Blackwood in Adelaide, has a plan to make the event more national, rather than heavily South Australian.
He says the interactive dinners at last year’s Tasting Australia worked exceptionally well, and visitors were keen to take part in more events where they could watch chefs work and talk to them about their trade.
“We wanted to make it more interactive where people could hang out and get a sense of what’s happening, rather than having a stand and saying this food is from the Fleurieu Peninsula,” Zonfrillo says.
Zonfrillo also has used his years of experience and international connections to bring British chef Marco Pierre White to Australia, and the world’s best female chef, Slovenian Ana Ros, along with Momofuku’s Paul Carmichael, Firedoor’s Lennox Hastie and other interstaters.
“It’s not often you see Marco Pierre White cooking in Australia,” Zonfrillo says. “For me to call Ana Ros and say, ‘Hey, do you want to cook in Australia?’, there was never any question (she would come). I don’t even need to ask them, they all want to come.”
At times the chefs will be wandering around the Town Square, and open to a chat around the multiple fire and coal pits set around the outside for cooking lunches and dinner, and sharing a drink around.
“If you stick a fire anywhere people stand around it,” Zonfrillo says. He specialises in cooking over coal. He has no gas ovens at his two Adelaide restaurants. Who doesn’t like cooking over an ancient heat source, and sharing pure food experiences?
“There’s something in our DNA that drives us to that style and it’s something that’s often overlooked about the act of cooking on a fire and it brings people together,” he adds.
HIGHLIGHTS
Heroines Table
Dinner at the Salopian Inn hosted by chefs Karena Armstrong and Alex Herbert, discussing women in food and wine
Fino Italian Feast with Marco Pierre White
White cooks a family-style Mediterranean feast with David Swain and Sharon Romeo at Seppeltsfield
The Glasshouse Kitchen
Nightly dinners in the Town Square’s bespoke glass houses featuring Ana Ros, Paul Carmichael, Jock Zonfrillo, White and Lennox Hastie, among others
The Grange Experience
Six vintages over six decades, including Penfolds Grange tastings from 1967, 1975, 1983, 1996, 2004 and 2012
Fresh Wine Disco
Tasting Australia ambassador Taras Ochota hosts a young wines tasting direct from the barrel with DJs spinning tunes, including Alex Dimitriades and Driller Jet Armstrong