Financial Times UK: “Vine dining: the gastronomic glories of the Mornington Peninsula” – Peter Wilson
“Just an hour south of Melbourne is a trove of smart wineries with restaurants that are destinations in their own right.
Sam Coverdale has the happy confidence of somebody who has worked tremendously hard at a passion project and is now happy with the results. In 2006, he set up his first winery in Canberra at the age of 29, and three years later he and his wife Emma launched Polperro, focusing mainly on single-vineyard wines from the Mornington Peninsula.
Coverdale’s Polperro and Even Keel labels are both distributed in the UK, where wine writer Matthew Jukes is a fan, calling the 2021 Polperro Estate Chardonnay “a legendary creation . . . utterly sensational and half the price of an equivalent Burgundy”. “I have always admired the wines from this impeccable estate but this 2021 vintage has completely blindsided me with its awesome quality,” wrote Jukes.
Coverdale joined me at a lunch table in Polperro’s restaurant, a sunny space set among gum trees beside an open-air deck overlooking vines and bushland, to explain how the introduction of a cellar door and restaurant in 2014 were natural progressions for his love of winemaking. “Wine on its own is great but if you can create experiences around it, that makes it so much better because wine is at its best when it is drunk in context,” he said. “The connection is so much deeper when you are eating food from this soil and looking at the actual vines that produced the grapes.”
Our four-course lunch set menu (A$140, about £75; drinks pairing A$80) began with canapés, the star being a shrimp, caviar and salmon mousse in a crispy little roll. Next was a sharply flavoured artichoke soup under a parsnip froth that made it look like a coffee, kangaroo tartare mixed with eggs from the estate’s own chickens, and salads mainly grown from Polperro’s 2.5-acre farm. The second course was roast kingfish with curry leaf and a tamarind and tomato sauce, which went well with a 2022 Pinot Gris with notes of apple, followed by dry aged duck with plum and confit leg.
Polperro offers accommodation for six couples next to its main vineyard. Coverdale’s wife Emma Phillips leads yoga classes on site, and runs a small fashion and homeware boutique in a nearby shopping strip, where the couple have also opened a second restaurant, Many Little. It offers a Sri Lankan-themed menu and has become a destination restaurant of its own. We sat at the bar in the evening for superb rotis, with exceptional starters of chilli salted squid and hot butter cauliflower with mushroom and mains of butter chicken, and pork-shoulder curry with black pepper lifted by coconut vinegar”. – Peter Wilson.
