King Valley, Victoria: follow the ‘Prosecco Road’

Food, wine, bocce, family traditions ... the Italian influence in Victoria’s beautiful King Valley is there to be savoured.

La dolce vita: La Cantina’s cellar door

I pluck a card from the deck of “Brown Brothers Colourful Conversations” found at my holiday home and read the first suggested conversation-starter: What did you learn today?

For a start, I learnt that rusting or redeveloped tobacco kilns are the iconic architecture of Victoria’s King Valley. These distinctive tin sheds with their jaunty, pitched roofs line a true alpine valley from Milawa south to the bush-shrouded Lake William Hovell. For reasons soon to become bleeding obvious, the entire valley is known as “Little Italy”.

The view over King Valley from Powers Lookout

Next card. What do you miss most about your childhood? Just ask Otto Dal Zotto, who emigrated from the northern Italian town of Valdobbiadene – the home of prosecco – in 1967 with a dream of growing the grape of his childhood in Australia. That became a reality when Dal Zotto Wines sold the first bottle of Australian prosecco in 2004, laying the first pavers for what they now call the “Prosecco Road”.

Playing bocce at Dal Zotto Wines,. Picture: Instagram

Otto’s son Michael shows me round the bocce court and his mum’s vegie garden outside the stylish cellar door, converted from what was, inevitably, the farm’s old tobacco shed. We finish with a classic Italian lunch (in the King Valley there’s no other kind) of pasta and meatballs, eggplant parmigiana and a glass of traditional “col fondo” prosecco.

Michael’s uncle is Fred Pizzini, one of four brothers who once ran the largest tobacco-producing business in the Southern Hemisphere. Fred planted his first grapes in 1978 and the family has been making nebbiolo under the Pizzini name since 1991, the longest consecutive vintage for any winery outside Piedmont. But man cannot live on wine alone, which is why I’ve signed up for Fred’s wife Katrina Pizzini’s famous cooking class.

Katrina Pizzini. Picture: Country Living

What food always cheers you up? Handmade gnocchi with garlic, sage and burnt butter sauce; tomato passata made from fruit grown outside the cellar door; jams, chutneys and pork sausages – guests can pull on an apron and learn the recipes that have sustained the Pizzini family for generations. “I’m not a chef,” says cookbook author Katrina. “I cook casalinga style: home cooking.”

We eat our fresh gnocchi in the Pizzini gardens under a maple tree, with a glass of Nonna Gisella sangiovese, finishing with a private tasting inside a renovated kiln, where rows of tobacco would once hang to dry from timber beams. “You’ve got to remind yourself where you come from,” says Fred.

Reminders can often seem unnecessary, though. Down the road at La Cantina, three generations of the Corsini family have been making preservative-free wine since 1979. The cellar door is inside an elegant granite building that Gino Corsini and his son Peter built, in the same Tuscan style of a house Gino built with his grandfather back in the homeland. Bring a picnic to the plush front lawn or build your own platter from shelves stacked with local produce. Peter and Linda’s son Reuban is learning the trade and tells me the red wines are still made the old way, in open-top fermenters – although the grapes are no longer crushed by feet.

What’s your favourite family tradition? Salvatore Politini is 88 and still plays the piano accordion every day. His daughter Lidia welcomes me into Politini Wines like I’m family and we share a crisp white Grecanico, a grape variety planted by the Greeks on one of their regular invasions of Sicily, and a ruby red Nero d’avola (“perfect with slow-cooked peasant food,” says Lidia). At La Dolce Vita Festival in the King Valley this month, Salvatore as always will entertain the crowd with music, while Nonna Josie whips up her Sicilian cannoli with muscat, ricotta and glazed orange peel, and kids play soccer.

3BlackSHEDS

My self-contained holiday home in Whitfield, 3BlackSHEDS, gives an architectural nod to those ubiquitous tobacco kilns: three black-as-tar sheds, sleeping two to six people. Inside it’s sleek modern industrial – polished concrete floors, wood-fire heater and a kitchen capable of some serious casalinga cooking. My bed has Belgian flax linen, feather pillows, a goose down duvet and a view over bushland. Provisions are at hand for a hot breakfast, and a high-country thunderstorm lights the valley in strobes, rain lashing the iron roof.

What is the best feeling in the world? Let me sleep on that.

• Perfect for: Wine lovers, families.

• Must do: Take a drive (and short walk) to the spectacular Paradise Falls in the Alpine National Park. Take in the views over King Valley from Powers Lookout. For information on the La Dolce Vita Festival (Nov 20-21) go to winesofthekingvalley.com.au.

• Dining: The Mountain View Hotel serves up sophisticated dinners in a family-friendly beer garden (start with a Pizzini prosecco margarita cocktail). Have lunch on the big, sunny deck at Chrismont Wines.

• Getting there: The King Valley is a three-hour drive from Melbourne.

• Bottom line: 3BlackSHEDS from $190 per night; 3blacksheds.com