Tourism’s best kept secret no longer
Some might call it madness to drive 14 hours for a meal. But when you also consider the wine, art and architecture on offer in this regional retreat, you can understand why.
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It is a crisp Saturday morning and I am soaking up the winter sun in a park while indulging in a treasured weekend ritual: good coffee, the newspapers, and a perfect crusty baguette slathered in butter and locally made raspberry jam. A few streets to my left there is a farmers market, where I buy fresh eggs, rhubarb and marinated feta to cook and eat later. To my right there is a very cool brewery and smokehouse I visited the night before and enjoyed melt-in-your mouth beef brisket.
The park I am sitting in is also known for its art. There are sculptures scattered along a pathway, one created by a blacksmith that evokes shooting stars in the night sky, another miniature bronze piece depicting a couple in the “dance of love”. My two kids are inhaling their breakfast – buttery croissants – on a third work, a bench held up by two struggling steel statues called Heavy Load.
So where am I? Not where you might think. Not in Fitzroy in Melbourne, Marrickville in Sydney or even Brooklyn in New York. I am not in any of the usual uber-cool urban setting associated with passionate people delivering very good, and very hip, food, wine and art. I am in the small rural town of Mudgee in NSW, a good 3.5 hours’ drive west of any cosmopolitan inner-city suburb.
But this town of more than 12,000 is undergoing a transformation, with a new generation of committed foodies, winemakers, producers, restaurateurs, architects and artists bringing fresh energy that is putting Mudgee on the map. These people are young, relocating from big cities, and not only do they want to produce the best food and wine, they want to eat and drink it themselves as locals.
There is the caterer-turned bread maker who has spent years perfecting the baguette to satisfy the cravings of her French husband and now sells out before 10am; the Sydney couple who moved to Mudgee during the pandemic and have opened a new seasonal produce driven eatery where you can eat delicious food as the kids run amok among the vines (and the chickens), and the florist and winemaker who turned their love of American barbecue into a bustling venture with a local brewery.
There are also the families who have been in this town for a few decades longer and set up key wineries, and whose children have gone, lived around the world, and since returned to work with their parents and take the businesses to the next level. You see them pouring wine at the cellar door on a busy Saturday, or managing the marketing and social media accounts, or expanding into luxury boutique accommodation to cater for the 691,000 people who visit the region each year.
“A lot of people are moving up here and setting up businesses, whether it is breweries or restaurants or producers, and you can tell they are passionate about it, which is great,” says Edwina Yeates, who works with her parents at Mudgee’s award-winning Yeates Wines after spending years overseas. “I think the influx of the people from the city has really lifted the standard for the locals. It has also bought an energy to the town that we needed to be a bit more competitive.
“We have always been the underdogs compared to the bigger wine regions like the Hunter Valley, but it’s never been about the money. Here it is more about a labour of love because it is mostly smaller-run family operations. I think when you are in the city you are never talking to the person who made the product, and what people love in Mudgee is that you talk to the person who owns the vineyard or produced the product or grew the food, or is the chef who also owns the business.”
Then there is the art and the architecture. Mudgee was founded in the 1800s among a number of gold fields and has the accompanying grand architecture. The main streets are dotted with heritage churches, banks, shops, a post office and courthouse. But it is also home to some really interesting, sustainable and award-winning new architecture. The Mudgee Arts Precinct is one example, a recently opened extension to an 1885 building and a finalist in the 2022 World Architecture Festival Awards. Designed by Sydney studio BKA Architects, the $8 million project is now the NSW mid-western region’s arts and cultural hub and has a beautiful gallery.
There are also the local architects. Cameron Anderson is responsible for the cellar door at Yeates Vineyard and its adjacent bespoke accommodation, the nearby off-grid, sustainable luxury sleeper Gawthorne’s Hut, and the cellar door at Rosby Wines. He chose the unusual technique of rammed earth for the Rosby building, which recently won the state’s top regional architecture prize.
“It was an interesting process to watch,” says Gerry Norton-Knight, who owns Rosby Wines with his wife Kay. “They had a pile of sand, a pile of road base and some cement, and they mixed it up in the carpark with a bobcat. They moved it over here and then they rammed it in place with hydraulic rams. They did a wall a day and they did all the walls in eight days. It was actually quite quick.”
Rosby’s new cellar door is also proof of what happens when the young return to Mudgee. Anderson is from Tasmania and also Norton-Knight’s son-in-law. The architect met Norton-Knight’s daughter Amber while working in Melbourne and they both relocated to Mudgee and have since had three children.
“What I have noticed in the 40 years of being here is that when Kay and I came, there were very few people my age,” Gerry says of moving to the town in the 1980s after he grew tired of being an accountant in Sydney. “Everyone was much older or just leaving school. That was when I had my doubts initially about whether we had done the right thing. Whereas my daughter moved back here at age 30 and she now has a huge network of friends. Mudgee has really changed enormously.”
I am chatting to Gerry over a glass of rosé and a slice of burnt Basque cheesecake (made by Amber) at a table outside the new cellar door. The late afternoon sun is throwing a golden light over the 410-acre property and its prize-winning vineyard. But what is different about this winery – one of 43 cellar doors in Mudgee – are the sculptures dotted throughout the landscape. There are bronze statues of people lying in the sun and a mother and baby hugging on the grass. Dozens of different pieces of art are scattered throughout Rosby Wines and its luxury accommodation offerings. We stayed in its beautiful guesthouse, which sleeps four couples in style, with chickens providing eggs every morning and views that actually rival the art.
This art is squarely Kay’s domain and part of an annual show she started in 2011 called Sculptures in the Garden. The exhibition – to be held from October 8 to October 23 – has had an impact not only on the winery but on local artists and Mudgee itself. It is now regional NSW’s largest outdoor exhibition, with more than 30,000 people attending over the past 11 years and the works of 500 artists displayed.
“It has really taken off and people just love it,” Kay tells me. “They spend the whole day here, eating, drinking coffee, or having a wine and just wandering. It draws people to Mudgee so everyone – the accommodation people, the food people, the shops – they all benefit.”
Kay started the exhibition back in 2011 as a way out of a bind. She was studying art and sculpture in Sydney and to pass the students had to stage a show. The problem was they could not find a suitable venue in the city. “I jokingly said, well I can hold the exhibition if you come to Mudgee, and everyone thought, why not?” she recalls. “It went amazingly. We passed our certificate and sold a heap. Now we have artists from all over NSW and Victoria coming to exhibit.”
Kay and Gerry’s love of art has gone beyond Rosby’s borders and into the town via the Sculpture Walk at Lawson Park (where we had breakfast earlier). Not only is there $45,000 in prize money on offer for artists who enter work but the winning pieces go on display permanently at Mudgee’s main park. There are now more than 25 sculptures.
One of the local artists who has benefited from Sculptures in the Garden is Michael Ferris. He got his start at the first show and has since been able to turn it from a hobby into a full-time job. His work is inspired by Mudgee’s landscape, and he has created flowers, seed pods, leaves and animals out of wood, stone and various metals. Ferris credits the chance to exhibit his work at Rosby and the encouragement of the greater Mudgee community with his success.
“There are some really creative people here, and it’s not just Rosby,” he says. “They are in wine and food and they are pushing boundaries, and that is drawing more interesting and creative people to Mudgee. It is like a snowball effect. I think the town has definitely had a mini-boom, and I think that has a lot to do with the creative community behind Mudgee and seeing the opportunity to create something different for the locals and tourists, like Kay and Gerry have done.”
Among those who saw an opportunity in Mudgee and jumped on it are Sophie and Nick Storey. For a decade they had a catering company in Sydney that serviced large corporate events, then the pandemic hit and made it untenable. The couple were trying to figure out what to do next when Blue Wren Farm in Mudgee came up for sale. It was primarily a wedding venue, but the pair saw the potential to turn it into something more: a delicious produce-driven restaurant that offered something in between the region’s fine dining restaurants and more casual pubs and cafes.
The Storeys made the leap in October 2020 and have spent two years upgrading the venue, adding accommodation and creating a new restaurant called The Barn. They have worked with head chef Jessie Adams – also from Sydney – to deliver simple, seasonal food to be shared, as well as a wine list that shows off a cross-section of the Mudgee region’s wines, sparkling wines and beers.
“One of the biggest things for us is to create a venue where the kids can run around and parents can sit and relax,” Sophie tells me. “And we are not necessarily just after families, but anyone, especially locals, who can just come here, sit in a vineyard, and enjoy a beautiful lunch without having to make a booking a month in advance as we are going to have space just for walk-ins.”
That was the experience my family and I had when we visited Blue Wren Farm. It was just before the venue opened in September, and Sophie’s team prepared a fabulous lunch while my kids chased the chickens in the mud wearing oversized adult gumboots We began with the best freshly baked focaccia I have eaten in a long time, peppered with rosemary and gorgeous local olives. Smoked trout rillettes with pickled shallots, fried baby capers and crostini barely lasted 10 minutes, and the chargrilled chicken with lemon, oregano, and garlic was just delicious. I may have even stole the kids’ crumbed chicken pieces and crunchy roast potatoes while they were out playing.
“I think Mudgee is a really exciting place to be for people in the hospitality industry,” Sophie says between courses. “It’s also a really evolving place. When we first moved here there wasn’t a good sourdough bakery or a bakery where you could get a decent croissants, and now there are two. I think it is constantly changing and there are a lot of young people trying new things.”
One of those bakeries is the Itty Bitty Bread Shop by olive.a.twist. Run by self-taught baker Rebecca Sutton, this gorgeous little store is tucked in behind Mudgee Corner Store (which incidentally has excellent coffee and local jams, and a barista who writes lovely things on your coffee lid such as “Mr Handsome” and “So Gorgeous”).
Not realising how in demand Sutton’s baked goods were, we turned up just before 11am to find the place almost empty – but we did get our hands on one of her prized sourdough baguettes. If only I had known how good they were I would have been queueing with the locals at 8am. Some of my fondest memories of Paris centre around tracking down the best crusty-on-the-outside, chewy-on-the-inside baguettes so when I say these baguettes were some of the best I’ve had outside the French capital, I don’t say it lightly.
“We are purist artisan makers,” explains Sutton. “There are no shortcuts. It is done by hand; we use single origin flour where I know the farmer; it is a long ferment, which makes a big difference. No commercial yeast is added to speed things up and we rest our dough overnight, which means the enzymes continue to act in the dough. We also pay for really good flour and use rainwater instead of the chlorinated town water.”
Sutton came to Mudgee and baking later in life, having studied agricultural science and working around Australia as a cook and caterer. A decision in her 30s to become a sommelier led her to Mudgee and then to her winemaking French husband Jean-Francois. It was his love of baguettes that inspired her to try to perfect sourdough after taking over a local bread business from a friend. She threw herself into finding the right flours, applying her agricultural studies and experimenting. “It is based on science and maths so I just had to work out how to apply all that,” she says. “I taught myself and it took time, but one day Jean-Francois went, oh my god, that is it, we don’t have to go home to France anymore as I have good baguettes! And for a Frenchman that is their everyday, so it was huge for me. I get a bit teary thinking about that day.”
She then applied her new skills to an array of other delicious things such as croissants, quiches, mille-feuilles, Portuguese tarts, donuts and brownies. She started at markets and then opened her tiny shop in 2021. She regularly sells out within two to three hours and is much frequented by locals as well as the visitors who flood into Mudgee on the weekends.
“This is a very much a foodie town,” Sutton says. “That is what grabbed me when I first moved here in 2010; I had found a community I could fit into. Most of the producers here have had a different career until they decided to follow their heart. They have applied the maturity they got from other roles. So the local distiller was in finance before he started up Baker Williams. Luke Spencer, a chocolatier, is an agronomist as well. One of our cheesemakers was also a vet. So it is all born from love.”
Another career jumper is Brody Crawford, who went from winemaking to producing American-inspired barbecue meats that literally melt in your mouth with his wife Laticia, a former florist. Their food is now on offer at the very urban, very cool Three Tails Brewery and Smokehouse in Mudgee (walking in, you feel you have been transported to Brooklyn or Marrickville).
Crawford started his barbecue business because he liked cooking that style of food for himself and his mates on the weekend. He took a punt and opened a food van in 2018, and by 2020 had gone into business with Three Tails. Local engineers built him a massive smoker – nicknamed “The Governor”– to tackle the amount of meat required and people now travel from all over the country to taste his beef, chicken and pork brisket, burgers, beef ribs and tacos.
“We had a phone call from a guy from Adelaide saying he was driving up on a Wednesday just to come and eat our food,” Crawford says. “He had no reason to come here except to visit us, so we fed him everything and he loved it and he got back in the car and went straight back to Adelaide. It’s crazy how far people are travelling for our food. It still hasn’t sunk in to be honest, but it’s mad.”
After spending three days in Mudgee eating and drinking everything on offer as well as meeting all these passionate people doing what they love, it doesn’t seem all that mad to me. In fact it seems pretty reasonable. I mean, who wouldn’t travel 14 hours for really good food?
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