Albany, Western Australia, where wine and whisky take pride of place
Wine, whisky and a wild coastline are all on offer in WA’s southwest.
Oranje Tractor Wines co-owner Murray Gomm likes to play a game with guests at his organic forage and feed events: name a fruit either not in his orchard or that he hasn’t at least tried to grow.
Someone starts with peach. “Yes, I have it,” Gomm says. “Guava.” Ditto. “Persimmon?” Another tick. Mango? He has the tree but it hasn’t fruited. Pomegranate is mentioned. Gomm tried it but the tree died.
Lychee! At last, Gomm replies “no”, adding: “If you want the game to stop, come up with a tropical.” Given we’re in the far southwest corner of the continent, that’s not a bad tactic. “Finger lime.” Of course he has it.
Okay, Murray, what about durian? Game over.
Albany, Western Australia has been on the tourist map for a long time, thanks to its stirring natural beauty, with Torndirrup National Park and the Vancouver Peninsula buffering its walnut-shaped harbour from the wild weather along Western Australia’s south coast. It displays some confronting aspects of its past through the National Anzac Centre and a historic whaling centre.
But now an interesting drinks culture has developed, through an acclaimed whisky distillery, a boutique brewery and a twist in the tale that is the organic winery/orchard.
On the surface, Oranje Tractor is a mainstream offering—distinctive wine and paddock-to-plate food in a bucolic setting — but it also works outside the square. Visitors enter along a gravel drive, past the espalier orchard and park beside the avocado trees. The vines are out of sight, behind a windbreak. The restaurant/cellar door and winery are half-hidden behind a lush cottage garden.
Gomm wanted to marry his background in health promotion with an itchy green thumb. That aligned with partner Pam Lincoln’s work in nutrition, which yielded to a deeper calling to make wine, which in turn resulted in a Churchill Fellowship to study organic viticulture in the US and Europe. Now, on a plot hived off Gomm’s parents’ cattle property 12km outside Albany, they have one of the few organic wineries in WA. Their wines are standards such as riesling, sauvignon blanc, shiraz, pinot noir and merlot. The flavours reflect the place they were created in: rustic, soft, not overly complex. They’re sampled with a ploughman’s lunch of local smoked chicken, several cheeses, Oranje Tractor’s olives, plum jam and sweet potato leaves, piled on to fabulous wholemeal bread.
Once that is out of the way, it’s into the orchard for a forage. Gomm’s first plantings were bananas, avocados and macadamias which, we learn, are expensive because they’re so labour-intensive to harvest. And to crack. The device needed to defeat the shell looks like you should be licensed to operate it.
We try satsuma and mariposa plums and a slightly tart gravenstein, one of 35 apples in the orchard. Then Gomm plucks a white sapote from a tree. It resembles a kiwifruit with alopecia but tastes like a pear and mango combination. “It makes incredible ice cream,” he says.
With fertiliser banned, Gomm practises what he calls regenerative farming, mulching whatever wood there is on the property. “I try to imitate the forest floor, to let all nature’s cycles, of which there are many, grow healthy produce.”
As we leave, we pass an ancient orange tractor which, Gomm explains, inspired one of his first Wwoofers—volunteers who travel the globe as part of World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms and who was from The Netherlands—to suggest the Dutch spelling for the property name.
There’s no explanation needed around our next stop, the Great Southern Distilling Company, but there’s still nuance to be found, in the single malt whisky that is making Albany, Western Australia noticed around the world.
Cameron Syme opened his first still 16 years ago and now oversees three. As well as one in Margaret River for his gin label Giniversity, there’s a whisky still at Porongurup, 50km north of Albany that produces Tiger Snake sour mash. The one on the shore of Albany’s impressive harbour is dedicated to Great Southern’s hero, Limeburners single malt. It was the first Australian whisky to win gold at London’s International Wine and Spirits Competition.
Syme is a hands-on chief executive who’s obsessed with making the best. He has even done perfume-blending classes in Paris to hone his nose as much as his palate.
He has several reasons for choosing Albany, Western Australia for his flagship distillery. First, because “you lose the romance in a city distillery”, he says. But mainly it’s the water, which comes from limestone aquifers under the district. Albany drinks the same water, and while Syme says it’s not great to shower in because it’s hard and full of minerals, it’s ideal for whisky, and the final blend is softened with filtered rainwater. The peat, meanwhile, comes from a bog near the Valley of the Giants, 100km to the west.
“There’s a lot of science to distilling but also there’s an art to it. You have to have a passion for it,” he says, and he’s good at cutting through the science and jargon to explain its essence. Even so, when he says that whereas wine has vintages, spirits have “expressions”, he’s starting to lose us. Best to let the whisky do the talking.
All whisky starts life as a brew, and that leads us to McKail, just west of Albany, where Wilson Brewing Company isn’t about to break the beer tragics’ stereotype any time soon. They’ve got a big tin shed to hold the vats, a minimalist tasting room/bar, an onsite food truck and a serious beard count of roughly 80 per cent of the staff.
As with whisky, the crucial ingredient is the water, says bar manager Rob Quayle. They use rainwater, filtered twice, and then it’s a matter of managing the other elements.
The place was opened in January 2017 by Matt Wilson, a home brewer who started small, selling to local pubs. Now it’s in 350 outlets, mainly in WA, a few dozen in Adelaide and one each in Alice Springs and Canberra. The range includes a draught plus six ales across the spectrum, from session, blonde and bitter to a pale, a dark and a brown.
The Brewery Bar’s food truck is more or less embedded into it, with the fanciest thing on the burger and fries-heavy menu being bao buns loaded with either beer-braised pork, crumbed chicken thigh or grilled haloumi. The pork goes nicely with the 5.8 per cent Rough Seas Pale, which is an omen for our detour to the Torndirrup seascape on the way back to town.
We’ve been told the best time to be at the area known as The Gap is when it’s really blowing. “Get 100km/h winds and this car park will be full,” says a local who seems immune to the gale that stands one’s hair on end. “That’s known as the Albany spike.” No doubt, in this town, they’ll be serving something called that in a glass sometime soon.
Jeremy Bourke was a guest of Tourism Western Australia.
This story was originally published in January 2021 and has since been updated.
