The cellar door for people who get what wine should be

While many cellar doors exist mainly to shift booze, this place is a shopfront for a philosophy that entwines wine into a way of living.

Mount Towrong in the Macedon Ranges

In the same way that a builder’s home remains unrenovated and chefs supposedly feed themselves cheese on toast, I don’t spend much time in cellar doors. It feels like work. But every time I visit my brother at his place among the verdant splendour of Mount Macedon, northwest of Melbourne, I make an exception and we head for Mount Towrong Vineyard. As you turn off a street lined with gracious homes, you round a bend and find a terraced vineyard carved among towering trees, a concrete bunker housing a winery cellar built into the hill, and an architecturally savvy cellar door building that’s both visually arresting and at ease with its setting. While many cellar door operations exist mainly to shift booze, this place is a shopfront for a philosophy that entwines wine into a way of living, indivisible from how we eat, connect and nourish ourselves in every sense.

When George and Deirdre Cremasco planted the vineyard in 1994, they did so with plenty of familial help and the freely given advice that comes from older Italian men watching people plant things. George’s father was from Veneto, so there’s prosecco alongside the Mount Macedon staples of pinot noir and chardonnay. To make a challenging site even more so, they planted nebbiolo too.

No matter the varietal composition, the wines made by viticulturist and winemaker Adam Paleg subscribe to a singular ethos (early picking, low pH, miserly application of sulfur), all in the cause of producing wines with graceful energy, finely etched detail and a great affinity with food. And that’s the key. While these wines are seriously good anywhere, they’re never better than when in coalition with the brilliant food on offer at the cellar door, the serene environment that elevates it and the hospitality innate in people like the Cremasco family. People who get what wine should be.

Mount Towrong wines

MOUNT TOWRONG ‘GIOVANNI’ NEBBIOLO PINOT NOIR 2023

$45

I love this wine for the way it combines the two varieties geeks take most seriously, relaxes them without diminishing them, and delivers pure drinking pleasure. Sour cherry, raspberry, a little balsamic lift, green peppercorn. Fine framed and diaphanous. Micro-fine tannins emerge deftly with time, giving the wine a gentle compression and quietly assured sustain. 13% alcohol, 95 points

MOUNT TOWRONG GRILLO 2023

$40

A wine of texture and tension. Grapefruit pith scorched by a candle, lemon verbena, green almond and dry straw. Preserved lemon salinity. Snappy, taut, enlivened by forthright acidity and buffed by fine, powdery phenolics. A wine made by people who understand food. 11.5% alcohol, 93 points

MOUNT TOWRONG ‘ESTATE’ CHARDONNAY 2023

$60

Racy, taut, mineral-laced. Lemongrass, white peach and honeydew, some ginger spice and crushed quartz. Lean and linear, flavourful but not an ounce of fat, this is a wine of purity and precision, finely chiseled through the palate and tied to a runaway chariot of nervy acidity.

12.5% alcohol, 94 points