Locals will tell you the Hills are best in winter - fog in the valleys, fires in the pubs, and waterfalls actually falling. Here's how to do the cold season properly.
There is a morning that happens up here, a dozen times each winter, that locals never tire of. The Adelaide Plains drown under a sea of fog, and the Hills float above it - ridgelines rising like islands, sun blazing on the gum tops, the whole city below erased. Stand at Mount Lofty Summit when it happens and you will understand why people who could live anywhere choose to live somewhere that needs firewood.
Winter is the Hills' most honest season. This is cold-climate country - that is the whole point of the wines - and from June to August it performs accordingly: single-digit mornings, mist threading the valleys, rain that turns every creek and waterfall back on. The crowds thin, the light goes silver, and the region's considerable indoor talents come into their own.
The fireplace circuit
The Hills pub is a winter technology, and the region runs a formidable fleet. The Crafers Hotel sets the standard - open fires, a wine list of genuine ambition, and windows full of weather. The Stirling Hotel does grand-village glamour with its verandah lights glowing through the drizzle; the Aldgate Pump Hotel keeps things properly old-fashioned beneath its oaks; and up on the ridge, the Uraidla Hotel adds craft beer brewed metres from the fire you are warming your boots at. The correct winter itinerary is a short cold walk followed by a long warm lunch, repeated until August.
Beyond the front bar
Cold weather is also the excuse the Hills' kitchens have been waiting for. Book a hands-on session at Sticky Rice Cooking School in Stirling and spend a steamy, fragrant afternoon building Thai curries from the paste up. Cellar doors are quieter and conversations longer; this is the season tasting-room staff actually have time to talk. And the gardens - bare, structural, mist-wrapped - have their own austere appeal, especially with no one else on the paths.
Winter ends, officially, when the daffodils break through in September. Until then: fog above, fire ahead, and somewhere in the middle distance, lunch. For the season either side of it, read our love letter to autumn in the Hills.
