Your weekly taste of Australia’s best food, drinks and spirited discoveries
Welcome back to Uncorked & Forked.
Christmas may still be a few months away, but apparently nobody told Australia’s food world.
This week we’re getting an early taste of the festive season with chocolate queen Kirsten Tibballs, who shares the Christmas food memories she still treasures — and reveals the rather extraordinary six people she’d invite to her ultimate dinner party.
Elsewhere, we’re pouring wine from some of the world’s oldest Marsanne vines, uncovering a Tassie Pinot bargain, heading west to a pub built for the workers who constructed one of Australia’s great engineering feats and contemplating whether Brisbane really needs 10,000 cannoli.
It does!
Christmas baking has become increasingly elaborate with chocolate domes, mirror glazes and perfectly piped desserts that look as though they require an engineering degree to assemble.
Ask Kirsten Tibballs, however, what takes her back to Christmas as a child and the answer is traditional.
“My mum’s Christmas pudding is something that immediately takes me back to childhood,” she tells Uncorked & Forked.
“She still makes it every year and hides her mum’s threepences inside, which we now exchange for a gold coin. We’ve always had trifle too, and I’ve added to the dessert spread myself with a gingerbread house, which the children always love.”
The celebrated pastry chef and chocolatier will be appearing at the Good Food & Wine Show Christmas Edition, which heads to Sydney from November 20–22 and Melbourne from December 4–6.
This year’s show includes a new immersive experience inspired by The Great Australian Bake Off, alongside the Festive Kitchen, Cooking School, Festival Village and Wine Selectors Secret Sips. Tibballs will be joined by Miguel Maestre, Darren Purchese and MasterChef Australia winner Nat Thaipun.
But for all the sophistication that has crept into modern baking, Tibballs still has a soft spot for the handwritten recipes many of us grew up with.
“Some of my best memories are of baking with my mum from her exercise book filled with cut-and-pasted recipes,” she says.
“We have access to so much more information now, and there are some incredibly skilled home bakers as a result. But I think we’ve lost a little of that personal connection, and the way recipes can become tied to people, memories and traditions.”
Her advice for Christmas Day is reassuringly practical: don’t make dessert on Christmas Day. A frozen dessert can be prepared ahead, while trifle is even better the following day. Tibballs suggests store-bought biscuits, sweetened cream and fresh mango for a simple version.
Then we asked the important question.
Give Kirsten a long table, six dream guests, one memorable meal and a bottle. Who gets a chair?
Snoop Dogg. Martha Stewart. Nigella Lawson. Gordon Ramsay. Alan Carr. David Attenborough.
“I think it would be a pretty memorable night!”
She’d serve classic pasta and salads, recreate some of her chocolate MasterChef challenges for dessert and open a 2021 Maurice O’Shea Shiraz.
We’ll bring the glasses. Cheers, Kirsten!
This isn’t simply an older bottle of Australian white wine.
Tahbilk’s Marsanne vines were planted in 1927 and are among the oldest surviving plantings of the variety in the world.
The winery holds back small parcels from strong vintages, allowing the wine to develop the complexity that makes aged Marsanne such an interesting proposition.
The 2017 1927 Vines Marsanne has had plenty of time to do exactly that.
Expect the youthful citrus character to have moved towards richer territory — honey, toast, nuts and spice — while retaining the acidity that gives aged Marsanne its backbone.
This one has collected enough gold medals to poke your eye out.
My Verdict: If you’ve only ever drunk young Marsanne, this is where things become really interesting. Age transforms it. Richer and more complex but still fresh, this is a fascinating taste of both old vines and what patience can do to a bottle of Australian white.
The Region: Nagambie Lakes, Victoria
Best with: Roast chicken, grilled fish or richer seafood dishes.
$44.95 cellar door.
Here’s the supermarket bottle I’d be grabbing this week.
Ninth Island Pinot Noir, from the makers of Piper’s Brook, gives you proper cool-climate Tasmanian Pinot without the usual Tassie Pinot price tag.
Think red berries and cherries, gentle spice and the lighter, silky structure that makes Pinot such an easy spring red.
The other attraction is the price.
Dan Murphy’s currently has it at $18 for My Dan’s members, down from $23.99. That’s almost six bucks staying in your pocket.
My Verdict: At $18, this is the sort of Pinot you buy for Tuesday night and happily open again on Saturday. Bright, easy-going Tassie Pinot without wandering into $30 or $40 territory.
The Region: Tasmania
Best with: Salmon, roast chicken, pork or mushroom risotto.
FESTITALIA | Brisbane | September 20
Brisbane is going Italian this Sunday, and subtlety doesn’t appear to be on the program.
FESTITALIA returns to the RNA Showgrounds with an anticipated 10,000 cannoli, wood-fired pizza, handmade pasta, gelato, espresso and Italian wine.
Then things get interesting.
World-renowned pizza acrobat Youssef Ben Touati will send dough flying, while there are spaghetti-eating contests, mozzarella-making demonstrations, ancient Roman cooking classes and the wonderfully named Nonna’s Slipper Throw.
Opera, Tarantella dancing, vintage Italian vehicles and roaming performers round out a day that effectively turns the showgrounds into one enormous Italian piazza.
Frankly, they had us at 10,000 cannoli.
FESTITALIA runs Sunday, September 20 at Brisbane’s RNA Showgrounds.
Gluten-free baking has come a long way from accepting a disappointing biscuit because there wasn’t another option.
Former MasterChef Australia contestant Melanie Persson returns this month with Gluten-Free Bakes, featuring more than 80 sweet and savoury recipes.
And she’s not playing it safe. There are butterscotch blondies and tiramisu cookies, lemon meringue and red velvet cakes, almond croissants, pasteis de nata, caramel éclairs, baguettes, jalapeño cheddar loaf and chocolate babka.
Persson was the first contestant to compete on MasterChef Australia as a gluten-free cook and has lived with coeliac disease since 2016.
Why it’s on my radar: This isn’t a book asking gluten-free bakers to settle for an approximation of the real thing. Persson is tackling pastries, breads and cakes many home cooks might have assumed were off the menu altogether.
Gluten-Free Bakes by Melanie Persson is published by Hardie Grant Books on September 29, RRP $45.
There’s history in the walls of Mundaring Weir Hotel.
The Perth Hills pub traces its beginnings to 1898, when the Jacoby brothers built the original Reservoir Hotel near the workers’ camps for construction of Mundaring Weir and the extraordinary Goldfields Water Supply Scheme.
One reason for opening a licensed hotel was apparently the amount of sly grog already circulating around the camps.
Fair enough.
When trains later brought visitors to see the weir, beer kegs destined for the hotel were reportedly rolled down the hill from the railway siding.
Then came World War II. The roof was darkened because the strategically important weir was considered a potential enemy target, while part of the hotel’s cellar became a bomb shelter.
More than a century later, the pub remains among the trees of the Perth Hills, serving pub meals and cold drinks to locals, walkers and visitors exploring the surrounding state forest.
Our take: A 128-year-old bush pub, beer kegs rolling downhill and a former bomb shelter beneath your feet. That’s Local Legend territory.
Wine isn’t the only liquid gold coming out of the Grampians.
Family-owned Grampians Olive Co has collected gold medals for all three of its certified organic, estate-grown extra virgin olive oils at the 2026 Australian Golden Olive Awards.
Its limited-release Olio Nuovo, pressed from green olives at the beginning of harvest, went one better and took Best in Class.
Signature and Delicate also collected gold, while Robust — made using Australian olives sourced from trusted growers after drought and heat affected the estate crop — won silver.
The Mathews family grows and mills its estate fruit at one of Australia’s oldest olive groves, beside Grampians National Park.
Worth knowing: Fresh olive oil isn’t merely something to cook with. Get hold of a really good new-season oil like this and pour it over warm bread, tomatoes or vegetables where you can actually taste it.
Until next Friday… keep discovering, keep tasting and never drive past a country pub on an empty stomach.
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