Hogget: destination for dining a trio’s long-held dream

A new venture is breathing life into the Gippsland district.

Hogget at Gippsland’s Wild Dog Winery. Picture: Tim Grey

Amid Victoria’s booming regional food scene, Gippsland in the state’s east has been a notable dead zone. Melbourne’s food lovers, spoiled for choice by destination dining options, have never been given much of a reason to explore the region. That may have changed with the opening of Hogget, a new winery restaurant in Warragul.

The winery restaurant is the brainchild of local chef Trevor Perkins and cult winemakers William Downie and Patrick Sullivan.

They hope it will be a huge step forward for tourism in a region with unemployment close to double the state average of 6 per cent, still reeling from the recent closure of the La Trobe Valley’s Hazelwood Power Station.

But Hogget is also the realisation of long-held aspirations for the three men involved.

Winemaking is an industry that enforces a vagabond lifestyle: plentiful work is available for only a handful of weeks a year. Sullivan and Downie have made the most of this opportunity, with careers spent bouncing from job to job around the state, country and globe. Along the way they’ve gained a strong following for their elegant wines and strong commitment to minimal intervention techniques.

As Downie says, he has dedicated significant time towards “understanding as much as possible so I can do as little as possible”.

Sullivan had long viewed the Gippsland as an area with untapped potential. Asking why triggers a dizzying sermon on soils, wind patterns, elevation, humidity and temperature.

Suffice to say it’s a great place to grow cool-climate wines such as the pinot noir and chardonnay he and Downie focus on. And grow is the operative word in their set-up. The winemaking team is wholly focused on working exclusively with grapes they grow themselves.

After a career spent making wines with grapes bought from contracted vineyards — some of them very good — Downie recently started growing pinot noir on his own plot in Gippsland, hidden just over the hill from Hogget. It was a revelation.

“When we started making wine from our own farm it became harder and harder to find the energy to keep making wine from other people’s grapes,’’ he says.

“The options were either do what we’re now doing or stop doing it altogether because mentally I just couldn’t continue to buy grapes. It was just killing me. It was not what I had set out to do in wine. I wanted to be a farmer, not a manufacturer.”

The life of a farmer resonates deeply with Sullivan, who says he wants to spend less and less time in a winery, and more of his life among the vines.

“My focus has always been towards farming and making wines from things that I do legitimately. That’s an honest progression. Fermentation takes what, a week? It takes the other 51 weeks to grow the thing, so where’s the most important part of it?”

Hogget’s wine list isn’t exclusively restricted to Downie and Sullivan’s wines, but the focus is certainly firmly placed on wines grown in the immediate region. The restaurant, nestled into a gentle hill, is itself surrounded by vines, visible on all sides through floor to ceiling windows. The food is almost entirely from nearby farmers and is cooked in a kitchen managed by Perkins.

After a long time at the helm of Warragul’s Big Spoon Little Spoon, Perkins was keen to focus on something simpler. He felt that his most enjoyable meals occurred around the family table with Downie and Sullivan — who he’d started to help out in his spare time — so who better to collaborate with in this new venture?

Perkins describes his menu as humble, and one that changes daily on the basis of what he has in the pantry: “Often you open up a place and try to please everyone, here we are doing the food we enjoy. It’s quite easy.”

And aside from any grand ­visions of transforming a depressed region, for Sullivan at least, this is about finally settling down after a life on the road: “We just want to have a nice place to live, and that requires people to come and see it.”