Wine columnist RICHARD CALVER visits two of the three wineries amid the hills and valleys of nearby Wallaroo. 

WALLAROO sounds like a song that Abba might have recorded in the ’70s. But it’s actually a superb region of hills and valleys, a green patchwork of bush and cultivated paddocks west of the Barton Highway where the ACT border folds into NSW. 

On a sunny spring day where the rain finally let up, mate Tom and I headed out to the Hills of Hall. We visited two of the three wineries that sit high and proud in this scenic locale: Brindabella Hills Winery and Pankhurst Wines. We’ll return one day soon to experience Surveyor’s Hill vineyards.

The Visit Yass Valley website tells us that Wallaroo is in fact named after “the very shy and very rarely spotted woolly black wallaby”. The canopy as we looked down from the terraces at Brindabella Hills Winery shows areas of dense bush that hug the Murrumbidgee River where these wallabies could hide with impunity. 

Later, Allan Pankhurst tells us that the dense bush also hides scores of deer. It is a wild and woolly area all right.

But that image contrasts with the commercial reality that is Brindabella Hills Winery. The owner, Michael Anderson, indicates to us that the restaurant is booked out solidly every Saturday and Sunday and we rub shoulders with a large number of people who are dining or wine tasting inside or who are on the grassy terraces fighting the stiff breeze that has arrived with us. It hasn’t put off the people outside who are palpably enjoying themselves.

Brindabella Hills has a unique approach to wine tasting. Derek Phillips, of Fudgemental, is a chocolatier who has matched a range of different flavoured chocolate with each wine on offer. For me, the most interesting match on the day was the macadamia pear chocolate that completely changed the taste of the 2021 Marsanne. Before melting the chocolate on the tongue, this wine had a distinctly herbaceous flavour, almost the presence of a bouquet garni, that was displaced by a more floral mouth feel after the influence of the chocolate. 

The wine that for me epitomises Brindabella Hills niche is the 2021 Sweetheart. This is a blend of late-harvest riesling, semillon and viognier that has a sweet finish. The cellar hand who presented the winery’s list to us, Jeremy Black, said of this blend: “We get a lot of young girls who have never tried wine before and they love this one.” 

The atmosphere and the clientele at Pankhurst Wines is completely different. It has a more family, homely appeal with views of paddocks framing distant hills rather than the Brindabella Hills vista of gorges and the rolling brown river as it wends its way to Wagga Wagga. 

Here we sat at a table constructed by Allan Pankhurst from an old wine barrel, rustic and practical, fitting into the feel of a visit to a kindly uncle who owns a farm where you can have fun. 

This feeling is reinforced by Christine Pankhurst’s comment about how they ended up settling in Wallaroo: “Allan wanted to live on the outskirts so he dragged me here in the 1980s,” she said. 

“At the time, all I could see were sheep bones and dust and dead bodies.” 

Her comments underline the transformation that they have brought to the property with its ordered paddocks and vines that produce some memorable wines. I’ve already written in praise of the 2019 Arneis which we tried again and recalled the way this wine finishes so cleanly with a good weight and mouthfeel. We also especially enjoyed the 2019 cabernet sauvignon with a great balance of fruit and oak, a wine that won a silver medal at the Cowra Wine Show this year. 

The Hills of Hall are worth a visit.

What’s funnier: mountain ranges or forests? Mountains, of course- they’re hill areas.