[NSW.Hunter] Wine, Views and great food, day 1 in Hunter Valley

Around 2 hours drive from Sydney CBD, we arrived Hunter Valley. This is the home to more than 140 wineries, specialised food stores and exceptional food.

In last two years, we visited hunter multiple times, during the different seasons of the year. We (or maybe I???? because I never need to drive?) never get bored of this area. There are nearly unlimited options to try. Its all depend on what you like at the end.

We didn’t research well before we step into this area. Yes, we just winged the trip. Here is where we visited on Day 1.

Generally speaking, a max of 3 wineries can be slot into a day trip, with a nice lunch somewhere. We also visited a lot of local food stores. Because wine is taste the best when pairing with food, right? 🙂

We drove out of Sydney at 9:30am and arrived hunter around 12pm.

Lunch:

Muse Kitchen (1 hat rated by SMH)

Keith Tulloch Winery, Hermitage Rd & Deasys Rd, Pokolbin NSW 2320

We started with our lunch first. Muse Kitchen is in a very beautiful white house with a backyard type of setting. We didn’t book but lucky enough to get a backyard seat.

Sun was absolute lovely that day. We decided to pick 1 entree, 2 mains and 1 dessert to share.

The food used a lot of Hunter local food and has some pretty decent dish. A more detailed review will be uploaded later.

After lunch Winery visiting:

When we finish our lunch, it was already 2:30 pm. Yeah, times goes very fast in Hunter. So we decided to go and find a Winery for some fun. Here is the Winery we picked this time:

Audrey Wilkinson Winery

This Winery has the reputation of the “most beautiful” winery in the whole Hunter Valley. It hides in the middle of a small hill, and there was probably 500-meter unpaved mud road before getting into this winery. So a proper car is highly recommended. However, it is a guarantee that you will be satisfied after you see its vineyard:

Amazing.

The winery has its own restaurant and bar and has a little museum in it.

We had a wine tasting here and loved how Danial from AW explains the flavour and the history of the wine. The tasting here including 6 wine. You can pick the wine you want to try by yourself, or you can ask the AW guy to pick. I chose Semillon because I love Hunter’s Semillon. Dr.R picked this dessert wine called “Vin De Vie NV”. We let Danial picked for us for the rest.

It was an enriching experience, and we got to try not only the young 2016 Semillon but also a 2009 reserved Semillon to compare. (Not too many photos inside because I was too focused on my wine….).

This is how the outside of the house looks like. The tasting was finished around 3:40pm ish. So we are heading to the next destination!

Most of the Hunter place closed at 5pm during the weekend. So we only had less than 1.5 hours to go. To make it a more relaxing day, we decided to try sth different.

Hunter Oliver Center

298/320 McDonalds Rd, Pokolbin NSW 2320

When we were on our way to AW, Dr.R was saying he spotted a lot of olive trees (??). Not too long after, I found this Olive centre hiding on the side of the road. Since we both love good olive oil, and really enjoy using it as sourdough dipping too, we decided to come here have a look.

The centre is not big, small, but with a wide range of olive oil available.

It actually offers olive tasting but we were too late, and all the tasting material was apparently sold out after a bus tour. It was nice and quiet, with no one but us there during that period of time. Although olive tasting was not available, we didn’t stop buying after we tried their garlic infused olive oil 🙂

It was around 4 pm already. We were tossing between another winery visit or something else. After a meaningful discussion, we decided to go enjoy some dessert…

I still swung by McGuigan Winery to get a bottle of my favourite dessert wine “late Picked Traminer”. I get it almost every year, and it was just purely delicious if you like a good dessert wine.

Then we arrived our final destination:

Sabor dessert bar

2342 Broke Rd, Pokolbin NSW 2320

This dessert bar has impressive views too.

Get a window seat, and I probably can spend my whole afternoon here.

The dessert here…are having this “very honest” size. They are huge. I know I shouldn’t use this word to describe dessert but they are definitely not something I can finish by myself: