Brigid Delaney enjoys clear days and cold nights during a sojourn most pleasant.
The last time I had been to the north-east of the state was during the year I turned 21 and every weekend there was a party. I had gone to a college with a lot of country kids – and a high proportion seemed to be from that region.
Months seemed to pass in a blur of car trips up the Hume,drinking beer and playing mix tapes. Wangaratta,Wodonga,Shepparton,Albury all merged in a sort of a montage. The parties were on a farm or in backyards or,for the posher kids,at a winery in Rutherglen or restaurant in Beechworth. What else? The loveliness and colours of autumn,the serious and still winters. Clear days,cold nights.
Whatever the season,later in the night there'd be arguments with bouncers while trying to get into one of those regional pubs:old heritage buildings,five floors,a sports bar and disco,pokies and trouble at 3am. The next day you would wake to a tangle of people in sleeping bags in the loungeroom of someone's parents'house and a dry feeling in your mouth.
More than a decade has passed since those 21sts and I am keen to revisit the region. Not to see its nightclubs,sports bars and hotdog vans – but its more sophisticated side.
One brochure told me that since 1994 the area had been branded as a gourmet region – evocatively titled"Milawa"– and one can buy regional produce in tastefully rustic and painfully authentic gourmet stores and restaurants.
Under exposed timber beams and tended lovingly by women in natural fibres,there are $6 loaves of bread that look authentically distressed – as if made by a farmer's wife with careworn hands and an ancient Saxon recipe. There are little jars of jam with deliberately faded labels and lumpy fruit and coquettish bottles of olive oil that whisper promises of faraway abbeys,secret recipes and virgins. There is cheese. There is wine. There are couples who approach the produce reverently,as if about to genuflect at an altar.
I have booked into Mount Pleasant Luxury Accommodation. Note the words"luxury"and"pleasant."It's hard for luxury to be unpleasant isn't it? I've never heard anyone complain that their luxurious five-star hotel was"unpleasant".
If it was,it wouldn't be luxurious.