Food and wine festivals are a particular passion of mine. If I were rich I would happily flit around the globe to these scrumptious events, savouring the lunches and dinners and enlightening masterclasses, boozing with chefs and restaurant critics into the wee hours in pursuit of bacchanalian nirvana.
I’ve been meaning to write about the 2017 Noosa Food and Wine Festival for a couple of months now. Despite the torrential rain we had a brilliant long weekend—a weekend that rejuvenated my spirits and left me salivating over the prospect of next year’s festival, only nine short months away.
The Royal Mail Hotel lunch at Sails was my undisputed highlight. One of the great things about food festival events such as this one is that chefs from different restaurants team up to produce a single kick-ass menu: in this case, Robin Wickens from the renowned Royal Mail Hotel in rural Victoria, and Sail’s own Paul Leete. Another admirable feature of these events is that the chefs talk through their creative process and the provenance of their star ingredients—music to the ears of any dedicated foodie.
Let’s rewind to Friday the 19th of May.
After sprinting towards the restaurant beneath the dubious shelter of a single umbrella, K and Mum and I arrive at Sails damp yet eager and are seated at a prime table overlooking Noosa’s stormy main beach. Abandoning the rather too sweet Quartz Reef sparkling from Central Otago, we order Campari sodas and watch in amusement as the sodden diners pour in from the boardwalk. Great fun given we are now safe and dry inside!
A short while later Paul Leete takes the stage to describe his delicious first course: a salad of Big Beryl tomatoes (planted especially for this event) matched with handcrafted buffalo ricotta, a zingy manzanilla olive tapenade and crisp zucchini flower.
The ingredients are locally sourced and deeply flavourful, from the ripe sweetness of the beefsteak tomatoes to the clean lemony ricotta (wonderfully named A Love Supreme after the John Coltrane album). Paired with the 2015 La Raia Gavi Cortese from Piedmont—a nicely structured white with a delicate oiliness and subtle honeydew characters—the salad is the perfect start to this four-course feast.
Leete’s next course is equally moreish. Juicy fillets of Moreton Bay Bug are roasted and then brushed with a yummy bisque butter before being pan fried. The bug is earthy and sweet, and the smoked corn puree and persimmon pickle that accompany it can officially count me as fans. While I’m not usually enamoured of South Australian chardonnay (I’m a Mornington and Yarra Valley girl all the way), on tasting the 2015 Shaw & Smith M3 from the Adelaide Hills, I decide to make an exception. Flinty and balanced with a smidge of vanilla, I could gladly drink it all day.
A pause ensues. Unable to resist, K and Mum order glasses of aged Barolo and commence a juvenile tickle fight—leaving them both in hysterics. A small drenched bird lands beside my stiletto and proceeds to flick its feathers on the patent leather. The tropical weather has gone to everyone’s head.
Rock star alert: it’s Robin Wickens’ turn on the mic. Wearing red and white high-top Nikes and with his arms folded across his chest, it looks as if he hasn’t slept in days. There’s a hush as he explains what we can expect from his two upcoming courses. A taste of frigid regional Victoria, apparently, given it was a bracing two degrees at his farm in the Grampians the previous morning.
His main arrives. It is one of the most beautifully plated dishes I have ever seen, though unfortunately its taste isn’t quite so harmonious. Essentially a charred beef salad with pumpkin and pickled slippery jack mushrooms, the meat is surprisingly served cold. Purple congo potato crisps and a haunting coal-infused oil can’t quite redeem the blandness of the star ingredients.
Wickens’ dessert also misses the mark. The savoury mallow leaf parfait coats my mouth and refuses to budge, though with its odd vegetal flavour I wish it would. It is served with poached quince and a grating of frozen blue cheese. Experimental? Sure. But I’d take a block of salted caramel Lindt chocolate over it any day.
Fortunately, the three of us are too sozzled by this point to mind. The afternoon stretches into early evening. Glowing lamps are produced, their light so enchanting we are forced to contemplate it over a round of Armagnac.
When finally we stumble out onto the windswept boardwalk, our faces are plastered with grins. A delightful afternoon spent in excellent company. Isn’t this the stuff of life?
xo