Words by Jay Dillon Images Supplied
The end of the winter ski season might be upon us, but that’s not to say the season itself has come to a close. In fact, for those who weren’t able to secure a winter getaway on the slopes, the spring season presents the perfect opportunity to explore the snow – without all the hustle and bustle.
An hour north of Melbourne, a once-derelict Gothic homestead has been coaxed back to life, complete with the Macedon Ranges’ only underground cellar and a particularly friendly stowaway. Jay Dillon and partner check in.
The first local to greet us wasn’t on the payroll, or so we assumed. Somewhere on the gravel between the cellar door and the old homestead, a cat appeared and set about the serious work of claiming us, threading figure eights around our ankles and looking up with the patient expectation of an animal that has never once been told no. Her name, we learned later, is Lexi, a calico who wandered in off the surrounding farmland about thirteen years ago, decided the place suited her, and stayed. The staff talk about her the way you’d talk about a colleague.
There’s something fitting about a stray adopting Cleveland Estate, because the estate itself is a story about something left to go to ruin and then taken back in.
The grand house went up in the boom years of the late 1800s, built for James Clark Daniels, a Kyneton haberdasher who had done well enough to want a country retreat worthy of the fact. He got one: red brick and steep gables, vaulted ceilings and stained glass, designed in the Domestic Gothic style with all medieval flourish and no classical restraint, and reckoned at the time to be without rival in the district. Then the 1890s land bust arrived, Daniels lost his fortune, and the house began a long slide. By the late 1920s it was the ruin the local kids called the haunted house, and it stayed that way until 1982, when Keith and Lynette Brien took it on. They rebuilt a collapsed wing from a single 1926 photograph and salvaged stained glass and Gothic timber from other century-old houses to make the place whole again, planting the first vines in 1985. The Lancemore group took over in 2020, and Cleveland now trades on the comfortable side of that history, with spa suites in the old homestead and a newer wing of rooms looking out toward Mount William.
The approach sets the tone. An easy hour or so up the freeway from Melbourne, the exit tips you into farm country outside Lancefield, green paddocks and fat cattle and the odd cypress windbreak, and then a long tree-lined driveway that makes you slow down whether you mean to or not. Our room was spacious and quiet. There was a wedding on when we arrived, and from the window we watched a bride and groom being marshalled around the courtyard for photographs while the last of the afternoon light worked across the old brick.
The wine lives underground, in a cellar dug beneath the estate’s original stables, the only one of its kind in the Macedon Ranges. A narrow stair takes you down into a cool, low-lit room that smells of stone and barrel. Our host poured through the Lindenderry Estate range, Lancemore’s own label, and the pleasure was in the comparison: Cleveland’s cool-inland Pinot Noir set against the coastal Pinot from the group’s Red Hill vineyard on the Mornington Peninsula. Same grape, two accents. One is all earth and undergrowth, the other brighter and sea-touched.
Dinner is served in the Carriage House, which began life as the property’s woolshed and was jacked up several feet during its conversion into a fifty-seat restaurant. It’s a dark, brooding room that does the sensible thing and gets out of the way of the view. We’d meant to order the handmade pasta and were talked out of it by the sight of the 1.5-kilogram T-bone, carved to share under a salsa verde sharp enough to cut the richness. Brussels sprouts arrived beneath a rubble of anchovy pangrattato; there were shoestring fries and a glass of the Lindenderry Shiraz. Earlier, the sunset had spread itself over the vineyard and a small lake where a gang of geese were seeing out the day, the whole weekend lit by weather it had no business giving us for the season. Dessert looked good and went unordered. We simply couldn’t.
The estate makes an easy base for the kind of day that fills itself, whether that’s sculpture and a cold gin at Nonda Katsalidis’s Mount Monument near Romsey or the strange, sacred bulk of Hanging Rock. But the real pull this time of year is water. After winter rain the rivers of central Victoria run hard, and we spent a morning chasing a couple of the falls they feed. Trentham Falls came first, the Coliban River dropping thirty-two metres in a single sheet over basalt columns, a rainbow hanging in the spray below the lookout. Loddon Falls, near Glenlyon, asks more of you: we left the car, skirted a muddy farm track, then scrambled down a short path to where the water carves through a rocky gorge, the noise of it filling the whole cleft.
Then back to Cleveland, where Lexi was waiting on the gravel, entirely unsurprised to see us. She’d found a good place to land. So, it turned out, had we.
The author was a guest of Cleveland Estate.
Visit Cleveland Estate to learn more.
It’s also a kid free – adult only offer with snacks and drinks offered in the room as part of the tariff. “We didn’t want people putting their hand in their pocket to pay $8 for a pack of nuts from the mini-bar,” says Shannon.
