Toasting 20 years of Taste Great Southern

Food and wine festival Taste Great Southern has showcased the fresh produce of the region for two decades, capturing the attention of visitors across the world.

From May 2 to 12, the annual festival marks its 20th year with more than 40 events taking place across Albany, Denmark, Mount Barker, Frankland River, Porongurup and Katanning.

CMS Events has facilitated Taste Great Southern since 2016, managing all aspects of the event including planning, business model, budget, marketing and logistics.

Director Richard Campbell said the food and wine festival had played a significant role in exposing established and new businesses.

“One of the objectives is to provide increased opportunities for locals,” Mr Campbell told Business News.

“The local wine produce has built a strong reputation partly on the back of the festival. Clean, fresh produce is now synonymous with the region.

“The event is approaching an economic impact of around one million dollars annually, with an estimated seven million dollars generated over the twenty years.”

Mr Campbell said Taste Great Southern had contributed to building the region’s reputation for gourmet food and exceptional wine.

This burgeoning reputation helped propel the Great Southern to become an invaluable part of the state’s tourism industry, he said.

“In recent years, COVID-19 set back the growth a little, but the longer-term message is still strong as the region rebuilds its tourism market share,” Mr Campbell said.

“[Taste Great Southern] is a critical part of the food and wine tourism delivery for the region.

“There will always be an event of this nature. If it did not exist, the region would lose focus, as the distance of four-and-a-half to five hours from the capital city needs a major tourism driver.”

A live cooking demonstration for Taste Great Southern 2018.

Plantagenet Wines managing director and Great Southern Wine Producers chair Tom Wisdom said locals were proud of the region’s place as a tourism destination and that Taste Great Southern gave producers the opportunity to express that pride.

“When we do our strategic planning for the wine region, we are looking closely at how to work with Tourism WA and other tourism bodies to get more people into the regions,” he said.

“The Great Southern is a very large wine region, a 200-kilometre by ten-kilometre area broken up into five different sub-regions, and each of those sub-regions is very different.

“Different microclimates, different soils … people can come and experience the diversity of our wine region, but there’s also fantastic natural production of food like free-range chicken, Wagyu beef, oysters straight from the Southern Ocean.

“Plus, we’ve got this amazing diversity of landscapes … the Karri forests, the yellow canola fields looking into the Stirling Ranges. There’s so much to offer.”

The vineyards at Plantagenet Wines were planted in 1968, marking the beginning of the Mount Barker-based winery’s long connection to the Great Southern.

Mr Wisdom started working at the wine producer in early 2018 before he and his wife, Jo Wisdom, purchased the business three years later.

In conversation with Business News, Mr Wisdom said Taste Great Southern gave the region and its producers great exposure and lured tourists to visit and explore.

“Every business will have different benefits that the Taste Great Southern festival provides,” he said.

“It really promotes the great things about the region. The quality of wine and food as well as some of the unbelievable natural beauty of the region and the diversity … so that’s attractive to get people into the region to experience that as part of a festival.

“As far as I’m aware, Plantagenet Wines has always been involved in Taste Great Southern.”

Buy West Eat Best WA food ambassador and chef Don Hancey is another to have been with Taste Great Southern since day one, facilitating cooking events and supporting educational opportunities for young chefs.

“I’ve been involved at different wineries doing food cooking demonstrations, or ‘food conversations’ as I like to call them,” Mr Hancey said.

“I’ve worked with many local chefs and their staff.

“Over the years, we’ve worked closely with the TAFE, which is a key ingredient in the whole mix because they’ve got commercial kitchens, they’ve got students who can assist with prep, [and] the students get to meet local chefs and celebrity chefs who come from overseas or the east coast.”

During his association with Taste Great Southern, Mr Hancey has worked with high-profile chefs visiting the festival from beyond WA, including Miguel Maestre, Gary Mehigan and Marco Pierre-White.

For the 2024 festival, Mr Hancey is set to deliver one of Taste Great Southern’s key annual events, Catch of the South, alongside several other chefs.

Internationally acclaimed chef Shane Osborn will be one of those guests joining Mr Hancey to deliver the nine-course degustation on May 9.

Perth-born Hong Kong-based Shane Osborn will return to WA for Taste Great Southern 2024. Photo: The Arcane Collective

Mr Osborn is the first Australian to lead a restaurant that has achieved Michelin star status: in 2001, during his time at Pied-a-Terre Restaurant in London.

He is now based in Hong Kong as the co-founder of the Arcane Collective, which operates three restaurants, one of which has one Michelin star.

“The event I’m working on for this year is with Shane Osborn … so these students working at the TAFE will get to meet the celeb chefs and get to learn a lot more about the industry,” Mr Hancey told Business News.

“What Taste Great Southern also does is bring these high-profile chefs into the region to get an understanding of what that region is good for, and then they can put one of those stunning, cool climate pinot noirs on their menu because they’ve actually been to the winery and met the winemaker.”

As someone who grew up in Bunbury and lived in Augusta for more than 20 years, Mr Hancey’s culinary values are entrenched in the importance of using local and fresh produce.

He said the way Taste Great Southern had elevated regional producers was priceless.

“Taste Great Southern has been an absolute gold investment for WA,” Mr Hancey said.

“What Taste Great Southern does for the growers and producers – not only the wineries, but the small veggie producers, the fruit growers, the honey producers, the cheese makers – is give them a wider scope of potential customers.

“If you’re a small producer and you get your name on the menu, and you get media talking about it or people just hearing about a product they didn't know about, that’s really good for their business.”

Mr Hancey also spoke to the attraction of the Great Southern as a rich tourism destination.

“I think the Great Southern has really come of age,” he said.

“It’s world renowned now and food tourism is still skyrocketing. A lot of people travel the world to go to a certain country to taste their food and booze.

“The Great Southern is so diverse and then you’ve got all the southern forests that flow into the region, such as Pemberton and Manjimup with their fruits, their cherries, their beautiful marron, which is unique to the South West.

“People from overseas look at WA and they can see all these stunning regions they can go to.”