On Saturday 15 August, eighteen of our Wine Club members gathered in the private dining room at Gallop House for our annual Palladian Lunch — an afternoon built around museum wines, a chef who cooks the way we make wine, and the kind of hospitality that doesn’t scale, by design.
A first for winter
This year brought something we haven’t had before: sun. In the middle of winter, for the first time in the lunch’s history, the doors onto the terrace could be thrown open — letting the light and the view over the lake and vineyard straight into the room, even if it stayed just warm enough that no one needed to step outside for it. A small change, but the kind that shifts the whole feel of a room.
An intimate scale, on purpose
Eighteen seats. Members can bring one guest, never more. It’s a deliberate constraint — the same instinct that keeps our vineyard to a single site rather than a portfolio, and our wine club allocations small rather than expansive. Some things are better kept close.
Museum wines, poured by the people who made them
The afternoon opened with a welcome aperitivo before moving into a three-course lunch, each course paired with museum vintages drawn from both our Palladian and Parterre ranges — bottles that are no longer in general release, tasted here alongside the people who made them. Nigel Gallop and Ellin Tritt hosted throughout, talking through each wine as it arrived: not a formal tasting note recited from a card, but the kind of conversation that only happens when the vigneron and the winemaker are sitting next to you.
Chef Paul Salmeri, Sal’s Pasta Deli
Lunch was prepared by Paul Salmeri of Sal’s Pasta Deli in Cottesloe — food that’s handmade, generous and grounded in good ingredients, built to sit alongside wine rather than compete with it. It’s the same principle that guides everything else about the day: nothing overworked, nothing performative, just good things done properly.
The secondi course was the afternoon’s centrepiece: three cabernets across three vintages, including a 2007 Parterre poured from magnum — a format that slows a wine’s development and, on a day like this, slows the room down with it. Tasting nearly two decades of a single vineyard’s cabernet side by side, against Paul’s Tuscan beef, is the kind of thing that’s hard to reproduce anywhere else.
Thank you to everyone who joined us at Gallop House. We’re already looking forward to next year’s lunch.
The menu
Here’s how the afternoon unfolded, course by course:
APERITIVO
Fremantle swordfish cotoletta with Italian caviar
Carne crudo crostini with toasted hazelnuts
Paired with 2026 Rosé
ANTIPASTI
Zuppa of roast fennel and cannellini with pangrattato, sage and Capezzana EVOO
Paired with 2013 Parterre Chardonnay
PRIMI
Agnolotti del plin, Robiola Rocchetta, wild herb butter
Paired with 2019 Palladian Chardonnay
SECONDI
Peposo dell’Imprunenta — Tuscan beef in black pepper, Chianti and rosemary
Paired with 2015 Palladian Cabernet Sauvignon, 2013 Palladian Cabernet Sauvignon, and 2007 Parterre Cabernet Sauvignon Magnum
DOLCE
Blood orange cake, dark chocolate EVOO mousse with honeycomb and sea salt
Paired with 2026 Ice Pressed Chardonnay
