The Lovedale Long Lunch
May 13th 2008 06:02
Hunter Vinyard
While I respect the eccentric observation of Mr Toad that there is nothing half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats, it would be hard to argue with anyone who embraces this more sedentary gourmand age that there is equally nothing half so much worth doing as whiling away a weekend eating and drinking your way around wineries.
Perhaps with the expense and exclusivity of boats these days, the vignerons in the boutique wine area of Lovedale Road had a suspicion there might be a market for an event that enabled enthusiastic toad like characters to progress and digress through their vineyards. The Lovedale Long Lunch began in 1994 as a food and alcohol poultice to draw the Hunter Valley wine tourists away from the high profile Pokolbin district west of Wine Country Drive to the septet of boutique wineries that stretch east along the winding Lovedale Road.
In the third weekend of May, when the sun still lingers with a bite from the summer but cooling breezes temper the valley’s heat, the seven participating vineyards lay out the hay bails, plastic chairs, and sun-umbrellas to provide day-trippers with the vintners’ finest and an array of cheeses, olive oils, local cuisine, and of course Alpacas products. I, like many others, went for the Alpaca ponchos, but stayed for the wine.
In a group of ten at just a sniff and a swirl under $100 each, Ray, Vietnam veteran and long suffering conveyer of Sydney day trippers, chauffeured us up to the Sunday session on a crisp autumn morning, the journey worthy of an excursion in its own right over the sprawling brown Hawkesbury River and through the endless hectares of eucalypt bush until the sharp Brokenback Range frames the valley. While gazing at the scenery we brushed up on our pursed lip tasting techniques, researched the properties of Alpaca fur, and armed ourselves with the full armoury of rote wine adjectives, ready to declare our glass plummy, noted with cherry, fragrantly sultanaed, herbaceous, as well as more rhetorically adventurous suggestions: ‘Am I picking up manure on the back of my pallet?’
We started the progression at the Allandale vineyard bottleneck. As the first participating winery after turning off the main road onto Lovedale, Allandale already had the tasting tables crowded and the hay bails occupied. After buying the five dollar glasses that act as a ticket as well as a free wine vessel, the most pressing decision was finding the most appropriate for breakfast. After canvassing the range at the tasting table the Sangiovese from Mudgee vines was chosen unanimously. This is a conundrum faced by the long luncher all day: the most appropriate wine for breakfast, a suitable tipple for elevenses, the perfect early lunch aperitif, what to imbibe at lunchtime, the ideal late lunch sacrifice to Bacchus, a cleansing lunch desert quaff, the penultimate high tea vino, and the climactic 4 o’clock swill. The abundance of choice is a stressful and taxing part of the day.
Making the decisions harder is the variety of foods with which to match the wines. $20 buys a lunch ticket, complimentary glass of wine thrown in, and an additional $8 ticket is a desert or cheese voucher. This is the progressive part of the lunch. Choose any vineyard that takes your fancy and try the cuisine on offer from a local restaurant. A helpful brochure allows you to plan ahead or you can throw caution and cabernet to the wind and take the cuisine as the impulse grabs you with flagrant disregard for order, as is l’esprit de dejeuner.
After the tasty Sangiovese that weighed in at a hefty 15.5% and could be best described from the book of wine clichés – hefty tome that it is – as light but spicy, Ray motored up the road for an early lunch at Gartelmann Estate, catered by Chez Pok and lubricated by a fine shiraz and a merlot that a magpie described as recollecting blackberries. Over a lamb loin lunch on Lovedale, lounging at the lake, the solo guitarist on a stage bordering the road pulled a crowd of adoring sloshed fans, serenading the ladies with Humperdinck classics and a voice smoother than the Alpaca fur on display at the other end of the lake.
I pause here to offer the Quando Quando Quando sing-a-long as an illustration of how unpretentious the Long Lunch is. Scale down the food by a few centimetres, notch up the price a dollar or two, quietly discourage the middle aged women from throwing their panties on stage, and it would’ve been alienating for anyone without a check shirt, boat shoes, and a platinum AMEX. Instead they let the fans shower the guitarist with adoration and show no snobbery when you ask for a bottle of their cheapest. The atmosphere at all vineyards is professional – they understand the gist of your observations even with barely lucid descriptions and they contribute to one’s overall education of the process – yet it’s also relaxed and this informality, accompanied by the readiness of the wine pourers to enthuse and serve generously, means the Long Lunch is more like the goodwill of a church cake stall combined with the boys will be boys tolerance of a pub on a Saturday night than an in-joke for grape aficionados.
Wandin Valley Estate was a fine example of this atmosphere. Set up around a cricket oval, we took our desert on the outfield at about fine leg surrounded on either side by the bush and the cricket pavilion. The farthest participating vineyard from the main road, the oval was gathering a small but committed crowd of mid afternoon nappers and half-cut debaters. Ray kept us enthralled with ‘Nam stories and brought us down a peg when we began debating about how pronounced the current and dried fruit notes were in the Muscat. On the affirmative, I must add that it was, it really did taste like a liquefied grapey fruitcake doused in meths.
Progressive lunches are of course paradoxical: they are degenerative rather evolutionary. As Lovedale Long Lunch became harder to say, Humperdinck was hummed, tasting notes became a scrawl, and the sun hit four on the dial, the long suffering Ray packed us into the mini bus steeling himself for another year of back to Sydney chatter from his passengers who in the span of five and a half hours had declared themselves experts in all matters concerning the production of grapes from fruit to booze. Perhaps Ray’s tolerance and Zen like calm were the result of instilled military discipline or the perspective gained from a life of harrowing situations. Maybe it was the smug knowledge of his sneaky back route into Sydney bypassing the grid locked F3. Most likely it was the knowledge that we’d be fast asleep by Gosford just a half an hour or so into the journey, all tuckered out so that he could us home in bed by 7.00 o’clock. As Ray knows, there’s nothing half so much as tiring as messing about in vines.
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