Melbourne Food & Wine Festival – Winemakers Feast

This is the second event at the 2017 Festival we got to. I’d booked before we decided on Antarctica in March. So straight off the boat (almost) and off to this. Sounded dangerous and it was. A select gathering of about fifteen tables of ten or twelve, each hosted by a winemaker who brought along their favourite wines! I was delighted to discover on arrival that our winemaker was Sue Hodder from Wynns Coonawarra. Great to have a woman winemaker talking to us. She graciously agreed to my request for a photo. She was very interesting about the whole process, who does what at a winery and her view of the need for new ideas all the time. She currently has a Belgium winemaker in what is her very small team to provide just that – new ideas and inspiration. She was lovely.

The other good news on the night, and that I hadn’t been aware of when booking, was that Scott Pickett of Estelle, one of our favourite restaurants was providing the food. At the end of the meal he came out and described all of the dishes we had been eating. Which, as you will see below, were all wonderful. Unfortunately it was a bit late in the evening for us to concentrate on his descriptions. It would have been better to have him talk to each course.

So what is dangerous about all of this you ask. Well, Sue was also celebrating her twenty second year at Wynns and brought along a magnum for her table! If it wasn’t bad enough that we were drinking her red wine with most courses, and her magnum, we also had some Italian wines with which to compare them. See what I mean about dangerous. I am afraid I succumbed. Here is the menu setting out everything that we ate and drank.

And here are my pictures of each course, showing how delectable they all were. Fantastic food. I’m surprised I managed to capture the later dishes. If you look carefully you will see where the wine started to kick in.

For reasons that escape me now, I took pictures of the wine we were served. I’m not going to caption them. They’re in order listed on the menu starting with the waygu beef. Note; two glasses each course, shiraz with our dessert (not to my taste), and doesn’t include the bubbly and the Wynns chardonnay (delicious) served at the start. Nor does it include top ups, which were unfortunately, and unnecessarily, plentiful. A night to remember indeed.