LIVING THE GOOD LIFE

Margaret River pulls back its velvet curtain to reveal a surprising and inspiring commitment to eco-conscious survival and it's working.

- FLEUR BAINGER

BEN MCDONALD LEANS on a weathered wooden bar overlooking rows of grapevines that wouldn't be here if not for his love story. He cracks a macadamia nut plucked from trees he planted 17 years ago and tells me he built this bar from planks upcycled from the old Bunbury jetty. Sheep graze nearby, tasked with vineyard weed picking and flanked by a crack team of bug-busting chickens, while pigs destined for the farm restaurant snuffle inquisitively on the fence line.

Formerly a traditional wheat-and-livestock property, Glenarty Road was worked by three generations of McDonalds before its current custodian, Ben, and his winemaker wife, Sasha, changed gears. They met in the property’s driveway in 2014 when she came to buy what Ben had planned to be his last grape crop before he ripped out the vines and focused on sheep farming. Fate intervened and eight years later they sustainably produce wines, seasonal produce and grass-fed meats that visitors can sample at their restaurant and cellar door.

They follow a paddock-to-plate, nose-to-tail and groundto-glass ethos, underpinned by regenerative farming techniques that rebuild the soil, eschew chemical use and embrace the wider ecosystem. They have a vegetable garden that supplies 80 per cent of what diners find on their plates and a cellar door housed inside a repurposed 1950s farm workshop where visitors swill and savour small-batch, minimal intervention wines. While you can do tastings there, you can also roam the Karridale property with a glass in hand, led between rustic, open-air vine-bars while plucking grapes and digging into house-made, zero-food-mile charcuterie.

This is not the image commonly held of Margaret River, Western Australia’s ultra-premium wine region now synonymous with wealth and sundrenched long lunches. But that’s just it: the posh perception is outdated.