Getting out of bed was challenging. It was 3 degrees outside and although the bed was a little soft for my liking, that didn’t make getting up any more enticing. I did eventually kick myself into gear and cooked scrambled eggs in the microwave. There’s a frying pan provided, but there is so little bench space it didn’t seem like a good idea to use it. I had no cheese to put in with the eggs, which was a major oversight on my part, so I resolved to fix by visiting the famous Stanthorpe Cheese shop at Thulimbah (not Stanthorpe) later in the day.
Once breakfasted and showered, we drove to the Balancing Heart winery near Wallangarra, a small border town whose main claim to fame is that it was the point where passengers between Brisbane and Sydney changed trains thanks to the different track widths between states. We arrived at the winery a little before opening and killed time taking photos of the resident farmyard animals, including a Highland cow, a black-faced sheep, a donkey and an alpaca. There were also a couple of dogs, though it was hard to tell whether they lived there or just turned up for the company.
We settled into a tasting hosted by a young Canadian woman who’d only worked there for two weeks, but already had impressive knowledge of the wines. A couple of the white wines were excellent and the reds that were mostly Italian styles were perfectly serviceable.
From there we made our back towards Stanthorpe with a coffee stop at Jamworks, which is a large roadside store that mainly sells condiments. We picked up some quince paste and crackers for tonight’s late snack. We’d intended another tasting at one of Stanthorpe’s original family-run wineries, Kominos, but they were shut, so we came into town instead, took some photos of some of the old buildings, and then headed to Josie’s for lunch.
Josie’s sits in a disused petrol station. We opted for the tasting menu and I had the matching wines, judiciously allowing the sharing of an odd sip across the table. Virtually everything in the meal was local, except for the tuna in the entrée. We opened with a freshly baked focaccia with a curry butter, then the tuna entree and some roasted cauliflower, before moving into lamb with miso mustard, followed by beef and roasted pumpkin all rounded out with marscapone with fennel sorbet. The food was superb and the wines were well matched, finishing with a Mexcal cocktail alongside dessert. For me the angry hiphop leaning soundtrack didn’t quite match the culinary experience. When you pay north of $200 plus for a meal I’d like the ambience to get as much attention as the presentation.
After lunch we drove to Castle Glen, something of an institution in in these parts for gaudy liqueurs. The castle itself was built in 1994, just 4 years after Cedric Millar made his first wines in his garage. Our interest was in liqueurs for ice cream making and there is no shortage, including knock-offs of well known brands, like ‘Tia Marica’ coffee liqueur and bottled cocktail mixes aimed at the Love Island fans. The building itself is quite out of character for the surrounds, but the operation has grown into a successful business, to the point where you can buy the whole castle, vineyard and the liquor empire for around $12 Million.
Our next stop was Heritage Wines, a short drive from Castle Glen. They pour an excellent Tempranillo, but deliver a pretty ordinary customer experience. Tastings are only offered by purchasing a ‘flight’ of five wines which you have to choose from a printed list. Your choices are the curated by the host leaving you feeling that the focus is on shifting stock rather than genuinely showing the range. No-one explains what the flight costs and there is no price guidance on anything you might want to buy afterwards. The Cellar door décor is really interesting, but I do tire of Queensland winemakers making snide remarks about quality compared to the Barossa. The prize-winning chardonnay that had reputedly put the Barossa to shame was, at best, uninspiring.
From one average customer experience to the next, we headed to the Stanthorpe Cheese shop. Stanthorpe Cheese is the Granite Belt’s original farmhouse cheesemaker and happily calls itself Queensland’s highest and coldest cheese shop, at about 925 metres above sea level. For years its cheeses were made from a single herd of Jersey cows on one farm, with the flavour and colour shifting with the seasons. They now source milk from local Norco farms due to drought, but the focus remains on traditional, hand‑crafted styles served out of a small on‑site shop. Unfortunately, when we visited there was no opportunity to taste anything prior to purchase and no-one on hand to talk through the range, so we bought a selection to go with the quince paste and crackers we bought earlier in the day.
We came back to the cottage and although we’d seen parrots on the drive in, they’d disappeared by the time I returned with my camera. I did however manage to corner some of the local kangaroos and ended up with a great little photo session with them.
Later I set up another astro shoot, playing with the ‘freeze-ground’ option to reduce the light pollution from the moon. Even with the gloves I returned with painfully frozen hands that needed thawing before we could properly enjoy the cheese platter and a round of toasted marshmallows
Leave a Reply