Yarra Glen: Cheesy, But in a Good Way

I've just returned from a couple of days in Yarra Glen, researching its attractions for a mini-guide to be published in The Age.

The town, east of Melbourne, sits within the Yarra Valley, a farming region whose most famous crop is the grape. As in the raw material used by wineries, of which there are many in the vicinity.

It's an interesting little town, with a mix of shops and eateries, and the usual smattering of accommodation from B&B cottages to the very grand Yarra Glen Grand Hotel.

But what struck me by the end of my investigations was how locally produced food and drink have become a major tourist drawcard in their own right. And not just in the Yarra Valley, but right across Victoria.

When I was a kid, living in rural Western Australia, the scenery in the countryside was fantastic, but you wouldn't expect too much of the food.

In those days, eating out in a town the size of Yarra Glen would entail a choice between a fish 'n' chip place, a Chinese restaurant producing heavily modified Cantonese dishes, and a local pub whose menu didn't stray much beyond steak & chips versus fish & chips. Oh, and maybe a nice prawn cocktail for starters.

But a scenic country town in 2009 is a very different place. Here are some of my foodie highlights from a winter weekend in the country:

• Being taken around a few of the wineries nearest to Yarra Glen on Friday. The highlight was Mandala Wines' intriguing new cellar door building. Constructed from recycled materials and built around the core of an old farmshed, with rubber flooring made from old tyres, it's an impressive example of the way wineries are putting up buildings that enhance the landscape rather than spoiling it. And Mandala's pinot noir is pretty good too.
• Lunch at Hargreaves Hill Brewing Co's restaurant in Yarra Glen's main street consisted of... a hamburger. But an impressive variant on the popular fast food item, composed of high quality ingredients and served on a wooden board with a neat longitudinal stack of chips on one side and a tiny cooked beetroot on the other. It was great.
• Narrelle arrived that night and we had dinner at the Grand, whose ground floor was a warren of rooms, each decorated in a knowingly retro way with different wallpaper and carpet. Some rooms suited families, others couples, and the menu was similarly diverse. I had the steak & veg... well, to be precise, the prime fillet of beef on a smoked bacon and potato brique, house made pâté quenelle and a mushroom sauce. And a bottle of Big Betty shiraz from just down the road in Healesville. Never seen that wine before, want to see it again - a big bold red, heavy and memorable.
• And finally, for Saturday lunch we made the short trip out of town to the Yarra Valley Dairy, which creates its cheeses from milk gathered from the cows on the same farm. In fact you can order a sample plate of cheeses from the counter within a converted old shed that's at the heart of the operation, sit at a wooden bench and gaze out the window at the cows and paddocks while you eat. Our selection included cow and goat cheeses, culimating in a spectacular Persian fetta. In addition to this we shared a small container of balsamic onions, a posh way of upgrading the humble pickled onion.

Clearly, food has become an attraction in itself, and particularly food that's derived from local sources. Since most 21st century citizens source their provisions from big supermarkets, it seems that an allure, even a status, has attached itself to old-style food produced from local ingredients in a small-scale way.

What that says about our psychology, particularly our relationship to food, I'm not sure. But it does taste very good.

Tim Richards travelled courtesy of Tourism Victoria.

Close Encounter of the Sculptural Kind

As any Australian travel editor knows, there's something enormously alluring about international travel.

Curiously, these editors receive far more unsolicited material about overseas journeys than domestic ones, even though domestic travel is much cheaper to research.

It seems that a trip to Europe is inherently sexier than a weekend interstate on a budget airline.

But addicted as I am to international adventures, there's no logical reason why a local trip should be any less enjoyable.

You can even travel very locally and have a good time. A case in point - last Sunday Narrelle and I visited the Yering Station winery in the Yarra Valley, just 40 kilometres east of the centre of Melbourne. We were interested in the seeing the works entered in the annual Yering Station Sculpture Exhibition & Awards.

What was novel (for most Melburnians) was our method of getting there - a train to the Lilydale terminus, then a bus from there. It was surprisingly easy to catch public transport into the Yarra Valley, but most people would assume it would only be practical by car.

The sculptures - a pretty flexible term, as most were not the traditional carved stone pieces - are scattered around the grounds and premises of the winery, making an attractive hide-and-seek game as you spot them among the greenery.

The one we had a particular interest in was Grosse Fische - Kleine Fische (Big Fish - Little Fish), a piece which had been foreshadowed some months ago in a post within John Richards' Outland Institute blog.

In it, artist Gaby Jung asked readers to send her empty fish-shaped soy sauce containers. The resulting work used masses of these plastic vessels to form a giant fish, suspended above a pool in which more soy fish float.

It was an impressive piece, as were many others in the exhibition. The winery itself is no slouch, either, being composed of a mix of historic and modern buildings set within beautiful grounds denoted by circular patterns of plants and paths.

After viewing the artork, we tasted home-made jams in the nearby shop, then climbed the stairs to the deck of the bar. We sat outside in the sunshine, sipping rosé and eating excellent sandwiches made with quality ingredients, thinking that perhaps life wasn't so hard after all.

Then we walked the two kilometres or so to the nearest town, Yarra Glen (which I always think sounds like the name of a bushranger). It was an easy stroll along a flat road past fields, though cars whip by at a fast pace.

One woman stopped and asked if we'd like a lift - bless her - but we declined and kept strolling. I'm always amazed by how difficult people who don't walk, think walking is - as if it's a major hardship to walk a couple of kilometres through attractive countryside on a pleasant day.

And the important thing, it occcurs to me, is being immersed in the environment when you're travelling. A car is handy to get from A to B quickly; but I always feel annoyed when tearing through a new landscape I'd rather be in contact with, while confined behind glass and steel.

So that was our Sunday. A visit to a winery, some great art, and a walk into a new town. It might be close to home, but I call that a travel experience worth having.