At home on the Ranges
27 Apr 2018
Melbourne’s Yarra Ranges, just over an hour’s drive from the city, are the perfect weekend getaway. You can tell by the traffic jam on a Friday afternoon as thousands of Melburnians head for the hills.
But if you can steal a few days off during the week – and what is retirement if you can’t do that! – you will be rewarded with a quieter, more enjoyable break. You can have a tree-lined English gardens all to yourself or taste gin at a cellar door that is packed on weekends.
It’s not too quiet, places are buzzy and service is warm and friendly, but it feels like a VIP tour of this popular region.
My first stop is for a caffeine hit at the popular Nancy’s of the Valley, a retro-styled cafe with a locals-first produce policy that sees your sustainable Silva coffee teamed with Tyrone’s raw milk– and the coffee grinds will end up distributed to local gardens.
Next I make my way to Four Pillars Gin, the Yarra Valley’s award-winning distillery whose cellar door is a bun fight on weekends. Today I stroll straight in and manager Kirsty Gorman pulls up a seat to show me the recently released barrel-aged gins: the Chardonnay Barrel Gin and the Sherry Cask gin. Mellow sipping gins. Gorman says midweek visitors to Four Pillars definitely get more attention with staff able to spend more time explaining the various tastings, and she sends me on my way with an Modern Australian Gin and tonic, a collab with Qantas and Rockpool featuring Indigenous ingredients like quandong with an Asian twist of Szechuan peppers adding bite.
Yarra Valley Dairy is another heaving weekend spot that is quieter, but far from empty, on my visit. It’s a quick stop as I’m almost late for dinner, but I grab the signature Persian Feta.
Farmhouse retreat
My stay for the night is The Farmhouse at Meletos, a 23-room boutique guesthouse, where I'm welcomed by a huge slate fireplace decorated with baskets full of Granny Smith apples – a nod to the accompanying orchard and cider-making business. My room has an orchard view and rustic country flourishes, where I change and head down for dinner and then sleep like a baby.
After breakfast, I drive to Cloudehill Gardens in Olinda, 10 acres of English-style garden with a Diggers Club run by Paul Mottershead. Mottershead takes me on a tour of the grounds, which we have to ourselves, and says midweek is a great time to head up for a class or some in-depth advice for your garden.
My last stop is the Proserpina Bakehouse down the hill in Sassafras. Inside a former nursery, this bakery and community garden is run by Gary Cooper and Carolyn Deutsher, partners who have previously worked in fine diners in the region.
This is a destination cafe with lines of cyclists outside before it even opens and its heart is the onsite milling and breadmaking.
“I believe the purpose of a baker is to extract the fullest potential of flavour and nutrition from the grain,” says baker James. “I think that the flour that you buy does not let me fulfil that purpose; roller mill flour strips the majority of flavour and nutrition leaving empty calories.”
I get a baking lesson from James, scratched into the flour-covered top of his work bench. He explains to me how, in his stone-milled flour, the germ of the wheat is where the action is, releasing enzymes into the endosperm, converting those starches into sugars which produces better colour, better flavours and better texture. This is seen in the breads, tarts, sandwiches and pastries at Proserpina Bakehouse – the one place I visit that still has a queue out the door even on my midweek trip. Join the queue though – it’s worth it.
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