Minimal intervention wines meet minimal intervention cooking in Warragul

If you stumbled down Crossley Street during the World's 50 Best Restaurant awards this month, you might have discovered That's Amore: a natural wine and Finnish snack disco, helmed by sommelier Giorgio de Maria and chef Pasi Petanen. For six days, it was the greatest bar Melbourne has ever seen. But not for the crazy wines spanning South Australia's basket ranges to Georgia, drunk in alley with lardo-draped sardines, although those were a huge part of the appeal. It was their delivery, at the hands of smart, passionate people that made the experience electric. It always is.

Which brings us to the conundrum of Hogget – a countryside collaboration between Victoria's natural wine royalty Patrick Sullivan and William Downie with chef Trevor Perkins of Big Spoon Little Spoon fame. By all accounts it's the bucolic dream at Wild Dog Winery, five minutes from Warragul.

The driveway is lined with flush trees and flaxen ponies; there's a double hit of smoulder from Perkins' smoker and a crackling fire. You're looking to vineyards. The menu reads clean: smoked trout nicoise, beef ribs with fresh veg. The wine list has every iteration of William Downie's single vineyard pinot noirs from 2011 to 2016. 

It's a party waiting to happen – it's just not quite happening yet. Right now, the venue is staffed by a crew you'd call willing, but not necessarily able. Not knowing what a Campari and soda is, or even that dessert wines and digestifs are a category ("I dunno – do you want red or white?"), doesn't set the scene for an enlightening vinous adventure.

Not a massive issue for groups who already know the works of Downie and Sullivan. They can get a peachy, fusty bottle of Sullivan's skin contact "Haggis" wine and have at the acidic heirloom tomatoes laid over malty bread.

But a menu with better descriptions for the lay-drinker might be nice, given Sullivan's deep straw Baw Baw chardonnay is about as far from familiar visions of oak and butter as you can get.

But onwards, and plate-wards. To be fair the entire thrust of the place is minimal intervention. The hunks of carcass in the kitchen's glass cabinets have been butchered by Perkins' dad. His mum grows much of the produce and trout, served whole, pan fried with almonds, are often caught by Perkins himself.

Often you hit that refined-rustic nail bang on the head. Definitely with a salad of house-smoked trout over broken waxy potatoes, biting olives from the vineyard's trees and sunset-yolked eggs with creamy dressing salted with just the right amount of anchovy.

Pink quails, still soft skinned out of the smoker, crown a tidy dish of buttery, nutty barley and silverbeet. Flathead tails fried in lemon butter with salad green eat exactly as they read.

You'd probably file the whole experience under country pub lunch over "polished winery restaurant". And that's exactly what a lot of locals want: sunny days on porch and steak with barbecued veg.  

Occasionally, execution doesn't make that brilliant produce sparkle to full potential. Inch-thick slices of breaded pork jowl are masses of still-wobbly, deeply porky protein that a bright herb and pickle dressing struggle to counter. Spongy gnocchi laced with a light lamb ragu are fine, in a home-style way, but you've had far juicier smoked beef short ribs at numerous barbecue restaurants in Melbourne. 

Closing lunch, maybe with a cheese platter of brilliant local goat's brie and snappy lavosh, which we're able to eat once we've begged for a knife, you can see the potential writ large.

But to draw on natural winemaking here, it's not just a matter of chucking great ingredients in a barrel and hoping for the best. A little more human intervention here could make a nice time, a great one.