I don't like olives. Still don't, not really. But at Lake Moodemere Estate, in northeast Victoria, a plate arrived before the meal and one of them stopped me mid-conversation. Everything served that day had come from the property or within ten kilometres of it. The olive was plump, unhurried, tasted like itself. I ate the rest of the plate.
That meal clarified something I'd been circling for years. The produce most of us eat has been optimised for a journey, not a plate. Picked before it's ready, stored for weeks, shipped across the country, selected for shelf life and visual consistency rather than flavour. By the time it arrives, the best of it has already passed. The supermarket model creates the impression of abundance while quietly flattening everything to an average.
What grows within reach, in the right season, and reaches you quickly tastes different. Not a little different. Completely different.
After Lake Moodemere, I changed how I ate, how I shopped, what I looked for. I started seeking out the producers in Victoria doing this work: farmers, winemakers, cheesemakers, chefs sourcing from their own land. Victoria has many, and finding them became one of the great pleasures of my weekends. What kept sitting with me, though, was that most were barely known outside a small circle, or celebrated only for their wine, never for the food. The makers whose decisions about soil, season, and variety made everything possible rarely got to tell that story to the people tasting it.
What I also kept finding was that the food at these places was extraordinary. Not pleasant or respectable. Food that required no explanation and no apology. What Victoria's best producers understand, and what the chefs working with them know, is that a plate built around seasonal, local produce doesn't need much done to it. It speaks for itself. When a skilled chef builds something refined and surprising on that foundation, the result is a kind of fine dining you do not expect to find in a cellar door or a farm dining room.
I'd been bringing friends to these places for years, the way some people recommend films or books. It was one of my favourite things to do. The meals were always memorable. But what struck me, every time, was that the story behind the food stayed in the kitchen. We'd eat something extraordinary and have no idea who grew it, what season it belonged to, or why this particular thing tasted so different from anything we'd had before.
At some point, the informal thing became a question worth answering: what if you could put a small group of people in the room with the makers themselves? On the land, in the season the food was meant to be eaten, with someone to open the door to the story behind every glass and every plate?
The Makers' Circuit is the answer to that question. Three producers. One day. A chance to taste what Victoria's best producers have spent decades learning to make, and to meet the people whose quiet obsession made it possible. These are places I have been returning to for years. I am glad, finally, to be able to bring you with me.
Mirna