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Each dish carries at least one rescued or repurposed element, and the menu is entirely unembarrassed about it. Egg white garum on the broccoli, spent citrus in the kosho under the octopus, spent coffee beside the passionfruit ice cream and a retired dairy cow with garum butter.

The sea breeze arrives first, as it should with this grape, then grapefruit and jasmine. The palate is dry and lean, bright with citrus and a faint toasty edge, and the acidity is chalky enough to keep everything in line. The minerals do the talking and the fruit lets them.

Red cherry, strawberry, black cherry and mulberry lead, then bramble and pepper. Described by a reviewer far more erudite than I as delightful and instantly likeable, an unusual thing to say about a tannic southern Italian, but well earned nonetheless.

Greco keeps its natural acidity through a warm Heathcote summer, which lets the fruit ripen without going soft. The winemaking is plain and the result is not. It is such an interesting wine because it is like nothing else.

The Great Ocean Road begins at Torquay and ends at Allansford, and most people spend the drive looking at rocks. This list is for the passengers who would rather look at lunch, dinner or afternoon tea.

The service deserves its own paragraph. It was busy enough to excuse a lot and nothing needed excusing. Orders came out in the right sequence and water appeared without a request. The tables on the footpath where we sat were looked after as well as the ones inside, which is not a given on a morning like this.

Everything about this experience is truly exceptional. Great big beds, super fluffy towels, staff all look like they've stepped out of a Coastal Living Magazine shoot. Where they could play on tropes and cliches, they have not.

The pitch is a beach club in the middle of a city, and Perth has the weather to try it. Not sure the hotel delivers on the experience though.

From Cooloongatta to Cairns, Queensland is seeing a dining boom. The state is longer than most people remember. We drove the whole thing from the Gold Coast tot he Far North and ate accordingly. Like the tourism slogan of years past. Where else but Queensland.

The menu leans classic European with quiet Asian inflections running throughout. They're subtle enough so you might not notice until the third or fourth course, at which point you realise they have been there all along. Premium seafood sits alongside heritage breed proteins, Belgian chocolate desserts nod to Van Camp's origins without tipping into novelty.

Pale pink, with a barely there blush that Provence has made into something of a competitive sport. In the glass it smells like someone opened a window facing the sea.

At $48 it is, genuinely, one of the most difficult wines in Australia to argue against. One esteemed wine mind called it the best sub-$50 bottle in the country. They were not being silly.

The food is where Dempsey's training asserts itself. The menu is compact and changes with the seasons and with what's available locally.

The word prodigy gets used about young chefs so often it's lost most of its force, but Allen is a reasonable candidate for the real version of it.

The Meringandan does not have a chef's bar or a natural wine list or a seasonal tasting menu with a chef's note explaining the provenance of the soil. It has chicken parmigiana. It has bangers and mash.

...and something vaguely Alsatian going on. Provence via Perth, basically.

The six course tasting menu reads like a love letter to a fifty kilometre radius

Malbec is not here to be overthought. It wants fire, salt and something politely and properly charred. Ideally steak. Preferably outside. It is generous, unfussy and reliably a good time,

Lunch moves at its own pace, not slow for effect, just steady. Dishes land clean and exacting, vegetables leading more often than not, treated with the kind of reverence usually reserved for proteins.

From Ningxia, along the eastern foothills of the Helan Mountains where vineyards cling to the edge of desert and altitude does as much work as ambition, this is a Chardonnay that feels both fluent and slightly out of step, in the best possible way.