How Grampians Grape Escape Marked The Festival’s 35th in Halls Gap

If you spent the first weekend of May watching your feed fill up with glasses of inky shiraz held up against the rocky face of Gariwerd / the Grampians, you weren’t alone.

It was the grand Grampians Grape Escape, which returned to Halls Gap for its 33rd year. A bit of daytime drizzle didn’t deter the 7500 attendees, who zipped up their rain jackets and donned plastic ponchos to embrace one of Victoria’s most essential food and wine events. Accommodation across Halls Gap (population 500) and surrounding areas ran at or near capacity. And for a region still finding its feet after the devastating 2024–25 bushfires, the buzz felt like a balm.

Across the festival grounds, more than 100 wineries, food producers and small artisan businesses came out in full force, offering samples of everything from shiraz to sangria, honey to hot sauce. The hard part wasn’t finding something good; it was drinking and eating everything in just three days. Challenge accepted.

The Grampians isn’t the first region that comes to mind when you’re buying a weekend bottle, but it should be. The area is classic shiraz country: the soils, the altitude and the diurnal temperature swings. Recent vintages across the region and the neighbouring Pyrenees have been exceptional. Punters sampled drops from all the longstanding local wineries, like Best’s, Dalwhinnie, Fallen Giants and Mount Langi Ghiran. Another standout was Subrosa, the husband-and-wife-run boutique label by Adam Louder and Nancy Panter (Louder earned his chops – and grapes – working at Best’s during school holidays growing up).

For natural wine lovers, Babche Wines was a real standout. The family-run label – which is poured at Attica and Old Palm Liquor – makes small-batch organic drops from grapes sourced across the Pyrenees. Husband-and-wife owners Tim Byrne and Niki Nikolovska follow traditional techniques, omitting sulphur and pressing everything by hand with a manual basket press. They have family legacies to uphold: Nikolovska’s grandparents made wine in Macedonia, while Byrne’s parents made shiraz on their one-acre bush block. The bright, fresh grenache and fizzy piquette had us coming back on Sunday to stock up. And we’re already waiting for their own vineyard to be ready next year.

But the standout bottle of the weekend was Grampians Estate’s 1878 Shiraz from its 2021 vintage, which nabbed a rare 97 rating from Halliday. Co-owner Tom Guthrie explained that it’s made from some of Victoria’s oldest shiraz vineyards (the Grampians famously escaped the late 1800s phylloxera outbreak). They can only produce it when a single barrel yields enough fruit (roughly 300 litres, making 360 bottles) and only when the vintage warrants it. Guthrie had the last few cartons of the 2021 vintage in his tent for aficionados to snap up. Upon tasting the full-bodied shiraz, which goes for $180 a bottle, you get the hype.

Between sips, the masterclass marquee offered workshops on everything from growing native bushfoods to cooking with fire and pairing wine with your home cooking. A highlight was a cook-up with chef Analiese Gregory, who led the kitchen at the beloved, now-closed Hobart restaurant Franklin. Gregory cooked with local ingredients alongside produce she’d foraged around her home in Tassie. She opened with charcoal-fired octopus served with a riff on Spanish ajo blanco, smoked macadamias and pickled currants – one of her “favourite things to have in the fridge”. Then came charcoal-fired oyster mushrooms on skewers, dipped into a sabayon folded through her home-made wakame jam. It tasted like something a restaurant would charge $38 for, and had every spectator lining up in front of the stage for a post-show bite.

Later, an afternoon masterclass from Backyard Botany, run by the effervescent ethnobotanist Jessica Moulynox, offered a practical primer on edible native plants. Moulynox explained the health benefits of saltbush – a salt substitute that actually lowers cholesterol – and Tasmanian mountain pepperberry, which has nine times the antioxidants of blueberries. She also gave away a few plants to get the green thumbs going, alongside a canape feast of quiches, crisps, dips and dukkah made with native ingredients. Afterwards, we were all wandering around the grounds with our heads down, looking for things to forage and eat.

Beyond the tent, dozens of artisanal food producers served a veritable degustation of samples. A standout was the black garlic from Springmount Fine Foods, which co-founder Carmel Masterson says might be the most misunderstood farmers’ market staple. Most people assume black garlic is a variety, but many more layers of work go into their award-winning product. On their five-acre block in Springmount, Carmel and her husband Brett Masterson grow their own bulbs, then roast them in a custom oven at 65 degrees Celsius for 40 days. Like a feast at the end of Lent, it’s worth the wait: the garlic becomes jet black, deeply sweet and molasses-rich in flavour. Put it in your salad. Put it on a steak. It belongs everywhere.

Elsewhere on the grounds, the French Aussie hybrid Long Paddock Cheese brought a fromage flight, including the standout Banksia, a 2025 gold medallist at the Olympics of cheesemongering, the Mondial du Fromage. They import starter cultures from France and let the Victorian milk do the rest.

At the Otways Distillery tent, gin lovers fell for the Forest Gin, a blend of eucalyptus, bush river mint, rosemary, lemon and juniper in a bottle that tasted like a walk through the bush after rain. Other standout distillers, like Timboon Railway Shed Distillery and Mrs Baker’s Still House, also poured out samples and taught punters about the right way to try neat gin.

The event returns from April 30 to May 2, 2027, and we’re already preparing to return and sample the 2026 vintage.

Broadsheet is a proud media partner of Grape Escape.