A mere lunchtime meeting with Eva Cassegrain doesn’t allow for covering the many facets of this fascinating woman, joint founder of the landmark local vineyard. Susie Boswell goes on an expedition that stretches well into late afternoon.

Eva Cassegrain and I are powering through the countryside in her twin- cab all-wheel-drive vehicle. She sets a healthy pace both at the wheel and in conversation as her enthusiasm bubbles over for the land here around the vineyard she and husband John have built over the past 30 years. She’s dressed in smart charcoal slacks, jodhpur-shaped at the hip – suitable both for our casual lunchtime meeting earlier today, or for leaping onto horseback – and a crisp white shirt monogrammed with the emblem of her landscaping business, Topia. She’s shod in tan Ariats, the ne plus ultra of riding boots: again, equally suitable for social occasions or while digging a tractor out of a ditch. Which latter task, indeed, she’s quite likely to take on at any tick of the clock.
She’s an amazingly capable, creative woman and awesome personality. Her beautiful, chiselled features remind me (for those with long memories) of The Big Valley’s Linda Evans or, more recently, Sonia Todd in McLeod’s Daughters – with a dash of Kate Hepburn’s joyful, free-spirited brio. Her dogs snapping at our heels, we visit her office next door to the family home, perched atop a hill overlooking rolling fields, suitably distant from what she calls the “hurly burly” of the winery. Like her, the room’s impeccably neat. Keen as mustard, she produces images of numerous impressive garden design projects: charming boardwalks, steep terraces, espaliered shrubs, overflowing urns and, of course, lush topiary. This is one of the pursuits she’s branched out into as the wine-making business has gradually relinquished its demands on her. Yet the winery remains her overriding achievement, built from scratch by the couple with help from both sets of parents.

Eva and John’s marriage seemed written in the stars. First, their parents immigrated from Europe after World War II: “John’s parents were French”, who landed “dead broke. My parents were Hungarian” and arrived “with not a cent”. John’s parents settled here; Eva’s family just over the range, in Tamworth. Eva’s the oldest of three girls; John’s the oldest of the three Cassegrain children (of six in all) born here. Coincidentally, the late 1970s found both studying agriculture at prestigious Roseworthy College, near Adelaide. Eva was 19, one of only six young women among some 150 male students, overwhelmed and homesick when someone said: “There’s a chap here who’s also from your part of NSW …”.

While studying, John worked part-time at Tyrrells, in the Hunter, and both young graduands took up posts there, Eva as a laboratory technician. “Agriculture’s my love,” Cassegrain says fondly, “but I’d worked as a Tyrrells’ lab technician, so when we started out here I did the lab work for our winery too.” The year was 1980, the pair married and moved into a shack on a rough patch of land where the winery now stands. “Basically, we lived in a double garage for the first five years. We painted it, fixed it up, but when we had people for dinner, we borrowed someone’s else’s house!” Now, by contrast, there are plans on the drawing board to extend the winery’s facilities to build a guesthouse to be used for hospitality.

Next year, the couple celebrates both the business’s 30th anniversary and 30 years’ marriage. There’ve been two sons, Alex, now 23 (named for Eva’s father) and Philippe, 21. Alex is studying winemaking at his parents’ alma mater, now of Adelaide Uni, and Phil works here in the winery. Reviewing the past three decades’ enterprise, Cassegrain reflects: “In those first five years there was a lot of physical work.” The winery land was chosen for its location, handy to the highway, not for intrinsic soil quality. “My biggest contribution’s the garden. It’s beautiful now, but back then the land was ugly as all hell! It was terrible soil – not fertile – shallow and low-lying, with brackish water underneath; not flash at all! The gardens have been developed on top of what was there: we had to create drains, bring in soil, compost, mulch … as well as build up organic matter for the vines.” She shows me old photos of arid, barren acreage – where lush gardens now stand sentinel, at the grand cellar-door entry. The area where the oval now lies “was swampy and rough, so when machinery was working on the winery I’d wait for a bulldozer driver to finish early, grab the ‘dozer, and flatten out the ground. I was cactus at the end of the day. Then I went home and cooked.” She not only spent long days, solo, manoeuvring heavy equipment clearing the land for the expansive gardens, levelling and shaping it, but needed to prepare meals at night for big contingents of itinerant vintage workers and a hodgepodge of other travelling visitors who came hand in hand with developing the wine business’s name. Today, the tributes to her work include the winery’s outstanding avenues of hundreds of thousands of beautiful roses; the oval, now with marquee, used for concerts; the front-door topiary; and the winery’s magnificent formal garden, popular for weddings catered by Ca Marche restaurant.

Her vivid recollections of the early period as “exhausting” aside, it helped her, new to the area, get to know the backhoe drivers, electricians and other district families. She developed, and maintains, a great fondness for Wauchope. “I had the children in the hospital there; they went to school there.” Still a keen tractor driver, slashing paddocks and baling and selling hay and mulch, she admits: “I look disgusting [at day’s end]; I wouldn’t dare go in to Port Macquarie, but I’ll bowl into Wauchope and not think twice!”

“I don’t mean to be too negative, but the first 20 years was a hard slog; building up the business while having the children was a big demand, physically tough.” The hardest time was a period about 10 years ago that she – rather endearingly – refers to as a “kerfuffle”. In a nutshell, the business was reorganised. “But,” she says brightly, “we got over that hump. Over the past three years it’s become a bit easier.” Now Cassegrain has time for some self-indulgence, of sorts. She looks after the winery gardens at arm’s length with the help of an “excellent gardener, a beaut bloke”. The luxury of pursuing her own interests includes working with a community group to save Wauchope’s old fig trees and joining a town beautification taskforce and the council’s Futures Development Board. But she still enjoys building with plants too, now on a commercial basis: her landscaping, garden design and rejuvenation business offers the intellectual challenge of problem-solving, something she finds stimulating and fulfilling. And wine?

“I was just a blackberry nip girl: didn’t drink at all. Now I enjoy it! The different areas, soils, climates, here and overseas  … and the wine growers, vineyard managers, winemakers – they’re all such neat people to know.

“They’re so … down to earth.”

> Out to Lunch is hosted by Lou Perri at The Stunned Mullet on Town Beach.