Good Weekend's Who Mattered 2019: Food / drink

Matt Jones, Cameron Mackenzie and Stuart Gregor: in six years, their gin has become our highest-selling locally made premium craft spirit, and is exported to 25 countries. Plus: Matt Stone and Jo Barrett, and Jock Zonfrillo.

Matt Jones, Cameron Mackenzie & Stuart Gregor

If there’s a trend in drinks this year, it’s the ascension of boutique gin, with at least 170 distilleries now making the juniper-flavoured spirit nationally. “This is largely due to gin and tonic now being thought of as an all-occasion drink, not just something to quaff with a cucumber sandwich at the tennis club,” says Callan Boys, national food and drink writer for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age’s Good Food. “Local producers have also changed gin’s ‘mascara thinner’ image, and made it something to collect and show off to your mates.”

Leading the way has been Four Pillars, the Yarra Valley distillery set up in 2013 by friends Matt Jones, Cameron Mackenzie and Stuart Gregor. Their gin is now the highest-selling, Australian-made premium craft spirit, exporting to 25 international markets. Last year, 90,000 people passed through the Four Pillars distillery door in Healesville, east of Melbourne, and the friends have high hopes for a Gin and Drinks Lab due to open in Sydney’s Surry Hills in the first half of 2020. In a sign of the brand’s remarkable growth in less than a decade, in March they sold 50 per cent of the business to Lion, which industry observers estimate cost the multinational between $30 million and $50 million. Only this week the distiller won International Gin Producer of the Year at the Oscars of the liquor industry - the International Wine and Spirits Competition in London.

Four Pillars is already in more than 2000 bars and retail outlets nationally, but the Lion deal gives it a chance to up the ante and compete on distribution with global gin brands such as Tanqueray, Bombay Sapphire and Hendrick’s. “Five years ago, Australian bars and restaurants would have predominantly stocked imported gins,” says Boys. “Now Four Pillars is sharing shelf space with other cracking local brands such as Archie Rose, The Melbourne Gin Company and Applewood Distillery.”

The ongoing gin boom may even have a positive impact on the native foods industry. “Australian gin is poised to stand out on the world market due to the unique flora that goes into many locally made distillates,” says Boys, “from lemon myrtle, Davidson’s plum, quandong to lilly pilly.”

Matt Stone & Jo Barrett

Sustainability has been the big food trend of the year. Restaurants around the country are promoting more plant-based eating; think contemporary vegetarian bistro Yellow in Sydney’s Potts Point and Shannon Martinez’s Smith & Daughters in Melbourne. Growing and raising dinner on site is also gaining traction, personified by the South Australian community cellar door The Summertown Aristologist. Using every bit of the animal is also right on trend; take Josh Niland, the king of fin-to-gill cookery, who doesn’t let a single eyeball or scale escape the plate at his Sydney fish restaurant, Saint Peter.

Every movement needs leaders, and sustainability has as its poster couple Matt Stone and Jo Barrett from Oakridge Wines. The co-executive chefs walk the talk at their garden-girt restaurant in Victoria’s Yarra Valley, where nearly every dish features ingredients grown on site or nearby, and where they strive for zero waste. Think trout fillets sourced from a supplier next door, amped with a compelling XO sauce made from the fish’s offcuts. They’re also taking the sustainability message nationally, through pop-up restaurants and talks at food events.

“Barrett and Stone’s strength is that they never paint a gloomy picture of the future of food,” says chief restaurant critic for The Age, Gemima Cody. “By ditching commercial flour and milling their own, and using potato scraps as a salty, crunchy dessert trim, they make the case so well their arguments are won in a single bite.”

Jock Zonfrillo

Native ingredients have been threatening to tip over into mainstream Australian cuisine for a decade now – the more you think about it, the more obvious it is that we’d all eat the food that’s been sustaining people here for 60,000 years. “Climate change only makes the transition seem more urgent,” says Good Weekend food writer Dani Valent. “Why grow water- and nutrient-hungry imported plants when there are alternatives that love this wide, brown land?”

Consistent supply has long been a stumbling block for producers, chefs and home cooks, which is why the construction of a shed for post-harvest handling, packing, cooling and shipping of wild products in Western Australia’s Kimberley is such a heartening move. Chef Jock Zonfrillo, founder of the Orana Foundation, and Bruno Dann, an elder of the local Nyul Nyul community, are behind the move. The shed is now a hub for those who harvest plants, seeds and fruits such as jilungin, wattleseed, red karkalla and gubinge, which can be safely stored and processed on site.

“It’s a game-changer for the Nyul Nyul people and other communities nearby,” says Valent. “It’s not just a new gathering place, it has huge commercial potential.”

Scottish-born, Adelaide-based Zonfrillo has been using Australian native ingredients since the mid-1990s, “long before most people could tell a finger lime from a Froot Loop”. His three-hatted Adelaide restaurant Orana focuses on native foods, and brought its crocodile bone broth and wattleseed miso to Sydney for a much-lauded, month-long pop-up in August. “Now that Zonfrillo has been appointed as a host of MasterChef Australia, we can expect Indigenous foods in every open-pantry challenge and on-country trips for contestants,” says Valent.

There are others putting their murnong where their mouth is, too, including chefs Kylie Kwong and Ben Shewry. Real progress will of course come when Indigenous people control the supply chain and get the recognition. Melbourne’s ground-breaking Indigenous cafe, Mabu Mabu, is owned by Torres Strait woman and chef Nornie Bero. Meanwhile, Aboriginal author Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, which used explorer diaries to uncover a sophisticated pre-European food culture, will screen as an ABC TV series in 2020.

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