By Yorke Editorial · · 6 min read
The Yorke grows barley for the world's brewers and oysters for SA's tables - and now keeps some of the good stuff home. A food-and-drink lap of the peninsula.
A pantry disguised as a peninsula
The Yorke has always fed other places: barley to the world's maltsters, wheat to Europe in windjammer holds, salt scraped from its pink lakes, crabs and whiting by the Esky-load. What's changed in the last couple of decades is that the peninsula started keeping some of the best for itself - and a proper local food-and-drink trail has quietly assembled.
Grain into glasses
Start in the middle. Minlaton calls itself the barley capital of the world, and at Watsacowie Brewing Company - the peninsula's first independent craft brewery - the local theme runs right down to the bar timber, reclaimed from a 130-year-old shearing shed. It's family-friendly, the beers are made on site, and it does roaring trade with the campers and caravanners on the lap.
Half an hour north, the barley belt produces its other surprise: Barley Stacks Wines at South Kilkerran, the Yorke's pioneering winery, where vines planted in 1996 now supply a cheerful daily cellar door with estate-grown shiraz, chardonnay and wood-oven pizzas.
Salt water on the menu
The east coast supplies the seafood. Stansbury - originally named Oyster Bay - grows plump Pacific oysters in the same clean shallows its wild beds once carpeted, and there's no better-located dozen in South Australia than one eaten by the foreshore. Add a summer feed of blue swimmer crab, raked from the flats anywhere between Pine Point and Coobowie, and the gulf has done its part.
The Cornish finish
Every Yorke food lap should end on the Copper Coast, where the pasty remains a living inheritance from the Cornish miners of Moonta. The bakeries there still argue, politely, about crimping - we've weighed in already in our guide to where to eat a proper Cornish pasty.
String it together - brewery, cellar door, oysters, pasty - and you've eaten the peninsula's whole history in a weekend, which is about the most enjoyable way to learn it.