Sydney rock oysters with champagne vinaigrette and salmon roe

Seriously, one of the great things about being immersed in the wine industry is the people you meet. Almost everyday someone will turn up and have a chat about things, look around the winery, taste a bit and be on their way. I'm not sure if it's only the wine industry that has this external interest in seeing how we do things. Do people queue up to see what doctors and accountants do day to day? No, we only really need them when stuff goes wrong.

It's probably because we are in the luxury item end of life's essentials – like you don't actually need wine to survive, despite how sometimes it might seem that way – we aren't necessarily saving lives, building huge superannuation funds but just making people feel better.

Recently I thought it pertinent to have a meeting with a financial planner. I hadn't been to such a place in, like ever, so now seemed like a good time. After all, it's not until you see the edge of a cliff that you feel scared about what it'll be like plummeting over it. That's exactly what it's like getting older. You know there are high cliffs out there, and falling off it is going to affect you one way or another, but because you aren't perched on the ledge you don't think about or plan for it.

Now, I'm definitely seeing the edge, and seem to be getting pushed toward it. So off to the meeting I go with all my paperwork, which was a hastily scribbled list of what I think I have. I may have misled them in our conversations prior to this as to what sort of pool of cash we were talking about. Why? Well there was a team waiting for me to discuss my future financial plans. It was quitecomical really, my torn-off used envelope with a few figures didn't impress the suits.

"What are your goals in your retirement?" they asked, with the same incredulous tone as if they were asking my pet dog the same question. It would be the same answer anyway. To pretty well keep doing what I'm doing now, have fun, run around chasing sticks. What do people want to do in retirement but live out of town, make wine or beer, travel heaps, meet people, cook and write? Having a career that is sort of a hobby helps but we agreed it's a good thing that you like what you're doing, because you ain't going to be able to stop doing it any time soon.

Then we spent the rest of the $120-an-hour consult talking about wine and food, and it seemed they were way more interested in what I did rather than what I'm going to do.

As I was saying, it's great meeting all these people and this week we had a group come through that deserved a lot of attention. Trait d'Union is a collection of artisanal champagne producers who all have these prime vineyards in the Champagne region and produce the wine themselves (As opposed to the "champagne houses" who tend to be producers who buy fruit).

Trait d'Union are in Australia at the moment with their travelling exhibition Dots and Bubbles. Here they have teamed up with indigenous artists and are showing the connections that wine and art have with the land and history. It's the first time this troupe has left Europe with their wines.

If you're into this gear you'll know names such asFrancis and Annick Egly from Egly-Ouriet, Anselme and Corrine Selosse, Pierre and Sophie Larmandier from Larmandier-Bernier, to name just a few.

Well, they are all coming over to lunch and at a weak moment I agreed to cook this lunch for them. Panic stations, it's all well and good cooking a light lunch each week for the team out here but this lot needs to be impressed you'd think.

It's not like we haven't got much on at the moment, being autumn we are busy picking fruit ourselves and the winery is filling up fast. You get that rising feeling like you are drowning in stuff you should be doing anyway, so throwing this into the mix has put a fair amount of strain on my usual, fairly clear diary.

What do you cook them? In most wine-growing regions they always stop for lunch and have all those who are working in the vineyards and wineries down for a long lunch. Rustic, simple food, plenty of wine and then back out in the fields. Clearly you need good government subsidies for this to underpin the loss of production but it does make for happy workers.

So that's the plan, have a long table set up under the vine-draped pergola. Big sharing plates of food and lots of wine flowing. You can see why this is everyone's vision of what vignerons get up to, why everyone seems to want to do this at the appearance of their first grey hair.

I've kept the lunch in-theme by making lots of terrines and roast vegetable salads, stuff you can make ahead of time and just roll out. As the tomato season is in full swing as well, a plate of sliced and chopped tomatoes, all varieties, drizzled with our olive oil infused with basil and piled up with fresh mozzarella. This is such an easy dish to knock together if you have good tomatoes to throw at it. More salads, baby greens with freshly roasted sourdough croutons, tomatoes, red onion, sloshed with olive oil and cider vinegar and just a plate of still warm, roasted sweet potato and grilled figs. It's all easy stuff when you have 20 hungry French farmers to lunch.

However, what they seemed to like the most were these plates of south coast oysters, drizzled in a light vinaigrette and topped with salmon roe. They couldn't get over the flavour of our beautiful, indigenous Sydney rock oysters. One of the perfect pairings with good champagne and a crowd pleaser. This is based on an old-ish Tetsuya Wakuda recipe which I still think is one of the best ways of dressing an oyster, if that's what you have to do.

Sydney rock oysters with champagne vinaigrette and salmon roe

2 dozen oysters, unopened

10 chives, chopped very finely

1 small jar salmon roe

black pepper

vinaigrette (recipe follows)

Shuck the oysters and save the little bit of water. Arrange the opened oysters on a serving plate packed with ice to keep them cold and hold them upright. Filter the oyster water and save four tablespoons for dressing.

Drizzle with the vinaigrette, add a scoop of roe, sprinkle with chives and a grind of black pepper

Vinaigrette

4 tbsp champagne vinegar

6 tbsp good olive oil

4 tbsp oyster water (yum)

1 tsp soy sauce

1 tbspmirin

1 tsp fresh ginger, grated

Place everything in a jar and shake to emulsify. Taste, it should be slightly salty, if not add a little more soy.