End of Year Sunday Luncheon

Travelling by bus from Melbourne, we finished the year with a luncheon at Victoria's most exciting new regional restaurant, the highly acclaimed LOAM Restaurant.  LOAM not only won Best New Country Restaurant, but also Dish of the Year.  It was also ranked 15th in the World's Top New Culinary Experiences.

Organised by members Erik Lehnacker and Graeme Edwards, this was a very special day. Loam Restaurant is set in an olive grove with stunning views across the Bellarine Peninsula to Port Phillip. In the year since it opened, arguably no other Australian restaurant has generated more excitement than Loam.

Chef Aaron Turner’s creativity combined with his passion for the freshest seasonal produce has clearly impressed the critics, being named best new country restaurant in Victoria and earning a place in the top 100 culinary experiences in the world.  Many of Aaron’s dishes draw inspiration from his time in the kitchen of two of the world’s top restaurants – Noma in Copenhagen and El Celler de Can Roca in Spain. We were also delighted that the current chair of IWFS worldwide, Chris Bonsall and his wife Sue, were in Australia at the time and were able to join us.

Of course when you have a restaurant that is so determined to serve only the best, freshest, seasonal produce available, it is extremely difficult to settle on a menu in advance, which makes wine matching and menu printing somewhat fraught!  But we were able to work around this by having multiple visits/food trials in advance (not such a bad thing) and having some options ready to go.

The other issue was that the restaurant typically serves a series of 7 or 8 small seasonal dishes whereas we needed to settle on only four slightly larger dishes for the function to make it workable.

It probably meant that our members didn’t see the full variety of what Loam is able to do.

But all that said, we were presented with a very impressive meal with service that was as professional as any we have seen in Australia – a brilliant service ethic untouched by its rising stardom.

It was a beautiful sunny day so Champagne (a delicious Diebilot Vallois Prestige Blanc de Blancs donated by Chris Bonsall) and canapés (oysters, radishes in edible soil and sweetbreads) were served on the patio outside.

Our first entrée was a ‘Hen’s egg, charred leek, salmon roe, whey’, slow cooked at a very low temperature.  We enjoyed the match with a pair of Rieslings, Egon Muller’s 2007 Kabinett Sharzhofberger from Germany and an older Australian Riesling, the 1999 Richmond Grove from the Clare Valley.  Both were generously donated by Erik Lehnacker.  Egon Muller’s 2007 is such a superb wine from a brilliant vintage – it was clearly the preferred wine on the day and we are looking forward to trying it again when it has acquired a little more age.

We then matched the 2001 Giaconda Chardonnay (arguably Australia’s top chardonnay) with the 2002 Girardin Meursault-Perrieres. From a beautiful vintage and a fabulous vineyard, the Girardin was typically the preferred wine match with the second entree of ‘Blue eye and its bones, garlic, celery, turnip’.

Bird and Pinot is a great match and Aaron Turner’s composition of ‘Squab, liver, king oyster mushroom, grains, chervil, endive’ for our main course was a wonderful match with an old and new world Pinot.  Engel’s 1999 Les Brulees from Vosne-Romanee and the 2006 Kusuda Pinot Noir from Martinborough in NZ both delivered well.  It is such a great pity that the world lost Philippe Engel in 2005.  Donated by member Tracey Mander, the Engel mostly showed beautifully exuding the richness of fruit and structure of the 1999 vintage, though sadly there was some bottle variation.  At the same time, the Kusuda, a cult Pinot which has taken the world by storm and impressed critics such as Tanzer and Robinson, was an immensely worthy inclusion in the bracket. As Graeme Edwards pointed out, fancy flying out your grape pickers from Japan to ensure that your handpicked harvest goes exactly according to plan!  This was probably the pick of the two Pinots on the day.

Being our final function of the year, we chose a celebratory dessert ‘Berries, pine, honey comb, vinegar meringue’ and matched it with what we believe is the world’s best demi-sec Champagne – the Selosse Exquise from Jacques Selosse.  As explained by Ian Westcott, so little of this is made we were very fortunate to have this special opportunity.  It was clearly the wine of the lunch but very honourable mentions also went to Girardin’s Meursault- Perrieres, Egon Muller’s Scharzhofberger Riesling, the Kusuda Pinot and the Diebolt Vallois champagne.

Please view the menu here.