Uncorked & Forked: Fire, flavour and a wine under water
Your weekly taste of Australia’s best food, drinks and spirited discoveries
Welcome back to Uncorked & Forked.
This week we’re heading to the Southern Highlands for one serious food and wine weekend, trying a new Adelaide Hills drop inspired by the Iberian Peninsula, and meeting a Sydney chocolate maker doing things very differently.
And then there’s the winery that’s gone 20 metres beneath the Southern Ocean. More on that shortly.
MAIN COURSE
Fire, flavour and a feast in the Southern Highlands
If gathering among the vines with some of Australia’s best chefs and more than 80 wineries, distilleries, breweries and artisan producers sounds like your kind of weekend, clear some space in the diary for October.
Horizontal Festival returns to Centennial Vineyards in Bowral from October 2-4, and the newly released program has plenty going on.
The name comes from the wine world’s “horizontal tasting”, where wines from different producers but the same vintage are tasted side by side. Here, that idea expands into three days of food, wine, music and conversation.
The headline attraction is Argentine chef and live-fire master Francis Mallmann, returning to Australia’s east coast for the first time in 15 years.
Mallmann will host Godfather of Fire, an intimate workshop built around live-fire cooking, stories and a shared meal. He’ll also appear on the festival’s new Maldon Salt Culinary Stage before rounding out his visit with a six-course Fiesta del Fuego at nearby Osborn House.
He’s far from alone.
Matt Moran, Mark Best, Mindy Woods, Lyndey Milan OAM and a line-up of chefs, producers and food thinkers will appear across the weekend, while acclaimed wine writer Nick Ryan returns to host Wine & Conversation.
Mindy Woods’ Ancient Flavours will explore Indigenous ingredients and food knowledge, Mark Best will open up his creative process in Teaching Creativity, and Simon Evans hosts a garden party built around the simple pleasure of cooking and eating together.
Then there’s the wine.
Brokenwood, Centennial Vineyards, Bimbadgen, Lerida Estate and dozens of other producers join distilleries, breweries, cider makers, oyster producers, salami makers, honey producers and food trucks across the festival hub.
Friday night gets a further kick along from Furnace and the Fundamentals, while Sunday becomes Family Day.
Food and wine festivals can sometimes become a very large room full of people trying to hand you tasting glasses. Mallmann cooking over fire among the vines is enough to get our attention, but the combination of chefs, NSW producers, music and intimate workshops makes this look like a weekend worth travelling for.
Find out more: Explore Horizontal Festival
Good Drops
Kooli: a little Iberian sunshine from the Adelaide Hills
Here’s a wine style we don’t see much of in Australia.
Adelaide Hills producer Emmalene has created Kooli, inspired by the Txakoli of Spain’s Basque Country and Portugal’s Vinho Verde: dry, refreshing wines with lower alcohol and a little spritz.
The intention is refreshingly uncomplicated. Serve it very cold, preferably with food, and pour yourself another glass.
In a nod to Txakoli tradition, Emmalene even suggests pouring Kooli from a height into a tumbler and there is something I really like about a winemaker actively encouraging us to forget the stemware.
My Verdict: Bright, dry, lightly sparkling and deliberately easy-going. This sounds tailor-made for an Australian summer, although we’re not convinced we need to wait that long.
The Region: Adelaide Hills, South Australia
Best with: Fresh seafood, salty snacks and a sunny afternoon.
A $50 cabernet for $36? Now you’re talking
Sometimes Good Drops isn’t about discovering something obscure. Sometimes a familiar bottle turns up at a price that’s hard to ignore.
St Hugo’s Signature Collection Cabernet Sauvignon 2022 is currently $36 at Dan Murphy’s, down from its usual $50.
It’s a proper cabernet too: blackcurrant and raspberry, violet and spice, dried herbs, integrated oak and those firm varietal tannins that make you start thinking immediately about dinner.
My Verdict: Bold, full-bodied and beautifully structured. At $36, this is the sort of bottle we’d be tempted to buy two of: one for tonight and another for when the price goes back up.
The Region: Coonawarra, South Australia
Best with: A chunky eye fillet and creamy mash.
Worth Knowing
Five courses of Wagyu… including dessert
How far can you take a Wagyu degustation?
Melbourne’s La Madonna apparently decided the correct answer was all the way to crème brûlée.
Executive chef Jacopo Degli Esposti has launched An Ode to Westholme Wagyu, a five-course menu dedicated to the celebrated Australian beef producer.
It begins with Wagyu tongue and moves through MB5 hanger steak carpaccio with bone marrow, tenderloin tortellini in a double Wagyu consommé and a 45-day butter dry-aged MB6 cube roll.
Then pastry chef Adrianna Kolda gets involved.
Dessert is a Wagyu tallow crème brûlée.
We’ll admit that one stopped us in our tracks.
The experience runs Tuesday to Saturday at La Madonna, inside Next Hotel Melbourne, until October 31. It’s $220 per person, with an optional $110 wine pairing.
Book An Ode to Westholme Wagyu
For Dad: forget the socks, pour the whisky
Father’s Day gifting can be a fairly predictable business, particularly if Dad already owns enough socks and barbecue tools to see him through to 2040.
Sofitel Sydney Wentworth has another proposition.
On Saturday, September 5, Melbourne whisky maker Andrew Baker from Bakery Hill Distillery will take over Bar Tilda for a guided tasting of five whiskies, including exclusive and unreleased expressions.
From there, guests move into Tilda for a three-course dinner incorporating Bakery Hill whiskies into the dishes.
Tickets are $140 per person.
If Dad knows his single malt from his double cask, this beats another pair of slippers.
More info:
On My Radar
Tramontana: Italy beyond the usual suspects
Italian cookbooks aren’t exactly thin on the ground, but Simon Bajada has found a fascinating road less travelled.
Tramontana: Northern Italian Recipes from Sea to Summit follows ancient salt routes through Italy’s northwest, beginning on Liguria’s Mediterranean coastline and climbing towards the mountains of Aosta.
Across more than 70 recipes, focaccia and farinata give way to walnut-sauce pasta, agnolotti, gnocchi and cheese-laden polenta.
Bajada is an Australian-born food and travel photographer and former chef, and the book combines recipes with his photography and stories gathered through the region.
Why it’s on my radar: It feels as much like travelling through northern Italy as cooking your way through it. And that’s our favourite kind of cookbook.
Local Legend
Chocolate that tastes of where it came from
Sometimes something lands on the Uncorked & Forked desk and you know before you’ve even tasted it that somebody cares deeply about what they’ve made.
Then you taste it.
Wembley’s Chocolate Makers is the work of Sydney bean-to-bar chocolate maker Josh Stacey, who operates from Brookvale and says he’s one of only three bean-to-bar makers in NSW.
The packaging is beautiful. Open the elaborate blue and gold box and there’s almost a manifesto inside explaining where the chocolate comes from and why Wembley’s makes it differently.
The cacao is sourced directly from small growers at prices Stacey says are well above Fairtrade levels, then turned into chocolate in Brookvale. Rather than blending away the differences between harvests, Wembley’s wants you to taste them.
As the message inside the box puts it: “So what you’re tasting isn’t a recipe. It’s a place.”
And that philosophy comes through in the chocolate.
The Dessert Lime 68 per cent bar I tried has none of the cloying sweetness of mass-produced chocolate. It’s clean, beautifully balanced and wonderfully natural, with the native Australian citrus giving the cacao an intriguing lift rather than overwhelming it.
Wembley’s also runs factory tours where visitors can follow chocolate’s journey from cacao bean to finished bar.
I’ll introduce you properly to the man behind it next week when Josh Stacey features in Starts at 60. For now, consider Wembley’s firmly on our radar.
Find out more: Wembley’s Chocolate Makers
A Bit Different…
What happens when you put a winery 20 metres under the ocean?
Now this is our sort of weird.
Off Augusta in Western Australia, where the Southern and Indian oceans meet, Subsea Estate is making Margaret River wine with an unusual piece of winemaking equipment.
The ocean.
During secondary fermentation, specially designed vats are lowered 20 metres beneath the surface. Instead of sitting quietly in a winery, the wine spends months being continuously moved by ocean currents while fermenting under natural underwater pressure.
Subsea Estate says that movement keeps the yeast suspended and influences the wine’s flavour and texture.
Its first immersion ran from May to November 2024, when winter storms regularly produced swells above three metres.
The company has since produced ocean-treated Sémillon and Shiraz, including bottles made entirely beneath the waves and others blending ocean and land-cellared wines.
This isn’t merely somebody sinking finished bottles for a good marketing story. The fermentation and maturation process actually happens underwater.
And apparently it’s working.
Its first Pure Ocean Sémillon received 95 points and made wine writer Nick Ryan’s Top 100 Australian Wines of 2025. The first release has since sold out.
We’ve heard plenty about maritime influence in wine. These people actually threw the winery into the maritime bit.
BEYOND OUR SHORES
Melbourne fire meets a Bali Sunday
If you happen to find yourself in Seminyak on August 30, lunch could be worth stretching out.
Masonry is taking its wood-fired Mediterranean cooking to Starfish Bloo at W Bali – Seminyak for a one-day Sunday brunch collaboration.
Group head chef Simon Polkinghorne, whose career includes more than two decades across Melbourne kitchens, is bringing dishes including whole rolled pork loin with green harissa, roasted barramundi with burnt butter, capers and lemon, watermelon with Persian feta, and potato gratin with caramelised fennel and cheddar.
The collaboration runs from noon to 3.30pm on August 30 at Starfish Bloo. If Bali happens to be on the itinerary, it’s worth knowing about.
ONE MORE FOR THE ROAD
Dinner under the stars on Australia’s oldest highway
Some journeys are better when nobody is in much of a hurry.
On September 18, a new luxury paddlesteamer called Australian Star is scheduled to begin cruising from Echuca along the Murray River.
It will carry just 38 guests on three, four and seven-night voyages, combining the nostalgic look and feel of a traditional paddlesteamer with modern cabins, an onboard restaurant and plenty of outdoor space for watching the river slide past.
And that’s where it gets interesting for us.
Days can include visits to wineries, farms and heritage towns before guests return for gourmet meals onboard or riverside barbecues beside campfires under the stars.
Australian Star is billed as the world’s only five-star accommodated paddlesteamer and uses a hybrid diesel-steam propulsion system built around an original 1907 wood-fired steam engine.
There’s something wonderfully Australian about the whole idea: good food, local wine, red gums, a wood-fired paddlesteamer and nowhere particularly urgent to get to.
Explore Australian Star cruises
Until next Friday… keep discovering, keep tasting and never drive past a country pub on an empty stomach.
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