Hunter Valley, New South Wales, Australia Travel Information

A TASTE FOR THE PAST...

Good food, wonderful wines, great places to spend the night, and a long and inspiring history – the Hunter Valley is a destination par excellence for travellers of all tastes.

Link to accommodation, cottages & bed and breakfasts in the Hunter Valley, New South Wales

Located 140 kilometres north of Sydney at the widest part of the coastal plain, the Hunter Valley accounts for less than two per cent of Australia’s total wine crush – yet the quality of those wines is beyond question. In spite of a notoriously difficult climate, the Hunter shows an almost inexplicable ability to produce soft, velvety, fragrant whites, and voluptuous reds.

Concentrated on the low, rolling country that lies in the shadow of the Brokenback Range, the Pokolbin region dominates the Hunter Valley’s wine scene. Any tour of the region should begin at the handsome Visitors Centre on the main road in Pokolbin. This smart new facility includes the Visitor Information Centre, The Hunter Valley Wine Society, The Wine Country Cafe, and a Wine Interpretive Centre. This is a great place to pick up information and maps, and for anyone with limited time, the Wine Society showroom is ideal.

While the prestige labels of the leading winemakers are essential to any tour of the region, no trip to Pokolbin is complete without visiting some of the smaller boutique winemakers. In many cases, the limited edition wines that they make are never seen on the bottle-shop shelves. The only way to sample these wines is by visiting the winery, where you might well purchase your bottle from the winemaker who has tended the vines, picked and crushed the grapes, sweated over the fermentation, put in the corks and stuck the labels on the bottles! Although wine touring is by far the most popular activity for visitors, the Hunter Valley has a number of other themes well worth pursuing – including its colourful history.

Situated 30 kilometres south west of Cessnock, the quaint village of Wollombi lies at the northern end of the convict-built Old North Road, originally the only road running north from Sydney. Wollombi – an Aboriginal word for “meeting of the waters” – is located at the intersection of narrow, wooded valleys between the Hawkesbury and Hunter river systems.

Since long before European settlement this was a meeting place of semi-nomadic Aboriginal tribes, and more than 100 significant Aboriginal sites have been identified in the locality of the village. In colonial times, a thriving community grew based around the traffic that passed along the Great Northern Road, until eventually, a new highway was built closer to the coast. Wollombi simply fell asleep, and its inns, blacksmiths and wheelwrights were left to gently succumb to the passage of time. Today however, in an age with a taste for the past, Wollombi is vigorously awake and many of its historic buildings have been brought back to life – without sacrificing their authentic character. Today, Wollombi is a superb and largely intact example of a mid l9th century colonial settlement. Its social life revolves around the bar at the Wollombi Tavern, one of Australia’s oldest country pubs and home of the famous Doctor Jurd’s Jungle Juice.

Thirty-five kilometres north east of the winegrowing district, the riverside town of Morpeth was once an important inland trading post for the Hunter River Steam Navigation Company. Due to the town’s comparative isolation, its old-fashioned shopfronts, wharves, and even the hitching posts along the main street have survived intact, and today Morpeth is a backwater of the best possible kind – a place for browsing through craft shops or sitting under a tree on the riverbank.

Another historic town in the Hunter region, Broke was settled as far back as 1824, and subsequently became an important staging point on the overland cattle route between the Hunter Valley and Sydney. Located 30 kilometres north of Wollombi on the eastern bank of the Wollombi Brook, Broke has recently made its name as the hub of a winegrowing area – the Broke-Fordwich subregion. This is one of the few remaining areas within the Hunter Valley wine country suitable for vineyard estate expansion. Wine acreage has tripled over the past five years, and the proliferation of small, privately owned vineyards has encouraged the reopening of Saxonvale – now known as Hope Estate – and the establishment of Margan Family Wines, as well as the progressive opening of numerous cellar-door operations.

Broke is also the centre of a new industry that may eventually come to rival wine production in economic value. Over the past five years, tens of thousands of olive trees have been planted in irrigated groves along Wollombi Brook. Most of these young trees have been selected for their oil-production potential, and a grower cooperative has been formed to establish processing and marketing facilities under the Hunter Grove label.

Among its rich repertoire of surprises, the Hunter Valley also has a number of fascinating country pubs. Beginning in the earliest days of European settlement, small country inns were established as staging posts on coach and bullock-train routes, or at river ports and adjacent to the thirsty coalfields and timber camps. Although most of the original slab huts have fallen prey to fire, flood and termites, many still retain the broad verandahs and elaborate iron lacework that were characteristic of the later Victorian era.

Over the years, enterprising tour operators have come up with some novel ways to tour the vineyards. Located at Branxton Road in North Rothbury, Balloons Aloft is famed for its dawn hot-air balloon champagne flights over the vineyards. Run by Peter Vizzard, a former world hot-air balloon champion, flights include a champagne breakfast and the guarantee of airborne sightings of the Hunter Valley’s resident wild kangaroo population – as well as sublime vision of sunrise over the vineyards.

Two-wheel travel is an ideal way to explore the vineyards of the Pokolbin region, and from their headquarters at the heart of Pokolbin village, Grapemobile operate various cycling tours of the wineries. For those who would rather do it alone, bikes are also available for hire.

Images courtesy Hunter Valley Wine Country Tourism