There are snatches of blue water you can see through the old gum trees as you drive along Paringa Road. Tumble-down apple sheds line the thin strip of asphalt. Beyond the old orchards vineyards and stringy bark forest in the distance, an arc of sea is dotted with a few big islands. This is the Western Port of my childhood, my youth. These are the lanes I used to ride on horseback, the orchards we used to scrump for apples. Back then you could walk the beach and recognise whose family was on the sand by reading the footprints. Time has seen the farms get smaller and the houses get bigger. With the new wealth came a much desired change in food and wine culture making this one of the top gastronomic destinations in the nation.
Paringa Road cuts through the gently sloping rich, red basalt slopes. Here grow thick gnarled vines that produce some of the most celebrated pinot noir in the country. Winemaker Lindsay McCall knocked on our farmhouse door in the mid 1980s. He heard we were closing down our dairy herd and wanted to buy the great stainless steel tank we used to cool down the milk. It was shipped to his then fledgling vineyard and in it he made one of his first vintages. Three decades on and his wines wow the critics vintage after vintage. Paringa Estate ‘Estate’ Pinot Noir is perhaps the archetypical Mornington Peninsula pinot with its fine tannins and lifted cherry aromas balanced with hints of forest fungus and lovely savoury finish. This makes it a wine ready to be matched on the table. At the estate restaurant it is served with Aylesbury duck breast, seared and served pink, with confit duck leg in a brik pastry shell and a sweet and aromatic morsel of swede. The restaurant at Paringa Estate is housed amongst the vines and manicured gardens while the cellar door offers those quintessential Western Port views of bush, bay, farm and vines.
Western Port changes its colour and mood with the season. In winter it takes on a battleship grey hue punctuated by white caps. Come autumn and the full moon before Easter is always fat and creamy and rises slowly over the Bass Hills of Gippsland to the east, flooding the water with shimmering gold light.
In summer, on a clear still day, Western Port can be Aegean blue. You can see this through the Mediterranean pines at the deck of the Merricks General Wine Store. The old twin-gabled corrugated iron store was built near the train line in the 1920s when the apples and cherries were carted down from Red Hill by steam train. It was built for the Weston family matriarch Tilley Weston who would hive off slices of cheese from a block with a wire cutter and knit toys for us kids. We owned the old store for a few years in the 1980s and when you shut the door at night you never felt alone. You always had the feeling of old Tilley looking over your shoulder.
The old store was so run down by the beginning of the 21st century that it was one cracked floorboard from demolition. A massive renovation saw the old girl bought back to life and the acquisition by the Baillieu and Myer families turned it into a destination dining venue.
Ostensibly a cellar door for the varietal wines made by the two families from the Baillieu and Elgee Park vineyards, the addition of French chef Patrice Repellin sees this old country store ring barked by Audis and Mercedes driven by appreciative diners. Repellin is well known for taking Toorak French Bistro Koots to award winning heights. He and his Australian-born wife desired a simpler life. ‘I so love it here,’ he says. ‘My wife and daughter love to ride and we love being in the bush and so close to the beach.’ Repellin has taken this casual approach to life into his kitchen with its windows looking into the garden of what was Tilley’s house, now an art gallery. His wine friendly menu might start with some oysters shucked to order, a little jamon and charcuterie before moving onto some chicken Lyonnaise or perhaps something as simple as burger or steak frite with café de Paris butter. ‘It is simple but delicious food in tune with the seasons,’ says Repellin contentedly.
A few clicks up Merricks Road is Merricks Creek Wines. This is a small but stylish family run business that has embraced the bucolic aesthetic of rural Western Port. The vineyards are encircled by windbreaks of old cypress and pine trees, the bull rushes in the small dam home to a family of percussive frogs. While the Parker family celebrate the laconic nature of the landscape they are impressively passionate about winemaking. The experience here is very much about enjoying the wine with food in the environs. Their 2015 chardonnay is crystal gold in the glass with touches of apricot, cumquat and lemon zest on the nose and crisp and flinty in the mouth. The 2013 pinot noir is beautifully supple and delicate with the outstanding primary aromas of strawberries and sour cherry impressing with fine explorative elements: tobacco, toffee and blueberries. With a shared plate from the compact menu: perhaps roasted tomatoes, Main Ridge Dairy goat curd on grilled ciabatta or thin slices of rare beef eye fillet and caper vinaigrette and a glass of one of the above wines, and the story is complete.
Heading south the roads become more windy. In the hinterland of Shoreham and Flinders the farms and forest are interlaced with a web of gravel roads and tracks that cling to the ridges; signs they were first made by timber cutters and their bullock teams.
At Flinders the old wooden jetty stands in still blue water. Yachts and little fishing boats are moored around it. The pier used to be double in size until a storm in the 1990s tore half of it away. This is the work space for Harry Mussels. When I went to kindergarten with him he had a different name but was always a water baby. He surfed and dived and went away to sea and came back a mussel farmer. His meaty little mussels are some of the best in the state. Harry grows them on long ropes off the coast between Flinders and the little holiday town of Shoreham. The mussels from Western Port have the advantage of feeding both in the cool currents from Bass Straight and the warmer waters of the bay giving them the lovely tang from the sea grass growing in the beds underneath.
You can buy mussels direct from Harry on his boat by the pier for $10 a kilogram or you can order them cooked at nearby restaurant Cook and Norman. Here chef Rowan Herrald gently poaches the mussels with fresh tomatoes, white wine, chilli, parsley that form a sauce in which is cooked fregola: beads of semolina that absorb the rich mussel stock making a more substantial dish. This casual trattoria inhabits the front of a renovated 1920s store on Flinders main drag. Flinders was a small fishing and then farming village that attracted wealthy holiday makers to the secluded beaches and rugged ocean cliffs, as early as the late 1800s. Herrald, his wife Janine and business partner Clinton Trevisi upped stumps from their critically acclaimed fine dining restaurant Terre at Dromana Estate over a year ago. Having worked in some of Australia’s best restaurants the team have settled on a Western Port location for a more casual existence. Their food is beautifully honest and produce driven using the framework of Italian trattoria cooking on which to showcase seasonal harvest. It could be a dish of fried local calamari, fennel, orange, chilli, aioli that could go with a Mornington Peninsula fiano or a verdicchio imported from Le Marche, Italy. At Cook and Norman the pasta is homemade, the pork free range and the desserts straight from Janine’s pastry kitchen. Janine is a highly skilled and talented pastry chef with her own ovens that supply both restaurant and the café out the back called Sorellina. This ‘little sister’ café is light, bright, fun and functional, offering good coffee, crisp, light and buttery croissants or a brunch fit for a farmer or surfer. Try the hearty Italian-style baked beans, redolent with rosemary, on top of a rich bed of polenta with provolone cheese and a poached egg for extra sustenance.
After lunch we head back to the pier. The sand is pure white offering a beautiful contrast to the azure blue water lapping at the pylons. Up on the wooden deck teenage boys take flying leaps and launch themselves into the water, just as we all did. Older and slower I don my snorkeling mask and, with my two young daughters, head underwater, looking for the sea dragons and sting rays. Just as we did when we were kids.
Paringa Estate
44 Paringa Road, Red Hill South, Victoria
www.paringaestate.com.au
Merricks General Wine Store
3460 Frankston-Flinders Road, Merricks, Victoria
www.mgwinestore.com.au
Merricks Creek Wines
44 Merricks Road, Merricks, Victoria
www.merrickscreek.com
Cook and Norman
Corner of Cook and Norman Street, Flinders, Victoria
www.cookandnorman.com.au
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