As much as we love oysters, we also love bubbles. You can imagine, then, that we were in our element for the Oysters + Sparkling event held as part of the 2017 Noosa Food & Wine Festival.
The event was held at Café Le Monde in Hastings Street, a café that sadly has since closed. For a while, Le Monde offered a great deal on Thursdays from 5 to 6pm, when you could get freshly shucked oysters for $1 an oyster. Oh for the days when you could get an oyster for a dollar!
The Food & Wine Festival has changed too. These days it’s Noosa Eat & Drink that attracts visitors from all over, who come to experience great food and wine in a relaxed chic setting.
But back to Café Le Monde and our memories of the 2017 Oysters + Sparkling event. The oysters featured were Wapengo Rocks from the South Coast of New South Wales. As South Coast oysters are among the best in the world (in our humble opinion), this was a great treat.
The oysters were paired with Mountadam Wines from South Australia’s Eden Valley and what a treat that was too, with its sparkling wine, Riesling and Pinot Gris all proving to be exceptionally beautiful matches.
The wine flowed freely for two hours, and the oysters just kept on coming – natural, with vinaigrette, with cooked toppings, in oyster shots, on sliders, and finally in chowder.
Wapengo Rocks oyster farmer Shane Buckley was on hand to talk about his product, and yes, he might be biased, but he thinks his spot, about halfway between Bermagui and Tathra, is the best place to grow Sydney rock oysters.
“They grow from Moreton Bay to Mallacoota but it gets a bit cool down there,” he told the crowd. “We’re very lucky to have an estuary that’s completely surrounded by national park. We have no impact from anything around us. If it wasn’t for our activities on Wapengo Lake (farming the oysters), we’d be classified as a pristine location. We’re pretty lucky to have such an amazing location.”
Certified organic oysters
Buckley took up oyster farming after spending 20 years as an intensive care paramedic. “I love working in an environment that’s so pristine,” he said. “I see sea eagles every day.”
He described his oysters as “wild organic”. “Historically Sydney rock oysters are cultivated in a post and rail situation and the oysters used to catch onto that. We bought the last two stick cultivation farms and completely converted them.”
Now certified organic, his operation uses only recycled or recyclable materials rather than the commonly used treated pine and tar-coated sticks. His floating ‘dynamic long line’ system has less impact on the lake bed, he says. “The sea grass has started to regrow and we’re farming more in the lake rather than on top of it.”
The end result is an oyster with a unique combination of mineral, salt and delicate creamy flavours.
Like Buckley, Mountadam’s then chief winemaker, Helen McCarthy, was conscious of her footprint in the Mountadam vineyard in South Australia’s Eden Valley. “My wines are made in the vineyard; we do minimal intervention.”
The NV Mountadam Pinot Noir Chardonnay was creamy and yeasty with lifted fruit characters of apple and strawberry, and we kept coming back to this one even though we couldn’t resist the Riesling and Pinot Gris.
The fruit for the 2016 Eden Valley Riesling came from vines planted in 1968, and what a beauty this wine was with its crisp citrus flavours and delicate minerality. The 2016 Pinot Gris had a little bit more texture to it, making it a good match for the natural oysters.
All praise to Café Le Monde for the great array of dressings and accompaniments they came up with. I loved the kombucha granita, and the lime, coriander and tequila dressing was really stunning too. There were others dressed with verjus, some with merlot mignonette, and a delicious cooked one with garlic butter and parsley. We lost track of how many oysters we had but let’s just say it was a lot.