Winter Harvest Weekend
Duration
3 days
Region
Scenic Rim
Transport
Self-drive
Fifteen years of farmers, producers, makers, chefs, and food lovers coming together for one extraordinary month, and this is how it ends. With flavour and flare!
The Winter Harvest Weekend is the Scenic Rim's grandest, most joyful celebration of everything this remarkable region grows, makes, and shares. A main street transformed into a festival of 60 producers. A lavender terrace dinner under open skies. A full-day culinary journey with one of Queensland's most passionate food ambassadors. Across three days that move from intimate vineyard tastings to fireworks over Kalbar, every experience is an invitation to eat well, connect deeply, and leave with a full heart and an even fuller esky. This is your Scenic Rim moment. Eat Local Month ends exactly the way it deserves to. Don't just watch the Scenic Rim celebrate, be in the middle of it.
Event highlights
DAY 1 — Fri 26 June
Morning - Fri 26 June
The weekend opens at its own unhurried pace at Bunjurgen Estate Vineyard for Chocolate, Cheese and Wine in the Vineyard, where five award-winning wines and fortifieds are guided through a tasting paired with local cheeses and chocolate that reveal the full depth of what this region produces. Wander the vineyard and 90-acre farm with your true blue Aussie vigneron host, whose stories and local anecdotes flow as freely as the wine. Settle on the lawns as the mountain views stretch out in every direction and let the afternoon do exactly what it was made for. A considered, generous opening to a weekend that only gets bigger from here.
Afternoon
From the vineyard to the preserving jar, the afternoon takes a deeply satisfying turn at Scenic Rim Cooking Classes for the Farm to Jar Pickling Workshop - SOLD OUT with The Drunken Farmhand. Long before refrigeration and supermarkets, the art of pickling and preserving kept pantries full and flavour alive year-round and this hands-on workshop brings those traditions roaring back to life. Learn the fundamentals of pickling and preserving before creating two 300ml jars of locally sourced seasonal vegetables to take home, choosing from onion, garlic, cauliflower, capsicum, carrot, or cucumber. Finish on the deck with a platter of the region's finest flavours and the quiet, deeply earned satisfaction of having made something genuinely worth keeping. The kind of afternoon skill that changes how you think about a full fridge forever.
DAY 2 — Sat 27 June
Morning - Sat 27 June
Saturday belongs to Winter Harvest Festival at Kalbar and everything the Scenic Rim has spent a month celebrating. From 9am, Main Street transforms into the region's most vibrant, flavour-packed gathering, 60 market stalls brimming with fresh produce, local wines, beers, spirits, and handmade goods, cooking demonstrations by Queensland's finest chefs and Scenic Rim Food Ambassadors, hands-on workshops, live music, and the crowd-favourite Tractor Pull that stops everyone in their tracks. Wander freely, eat adventurously, fill your esky generously, and let the festival's infectious energy carry you through the morning and well into the afternoon. This is Eat Local Month distilled into one extraordinary day.
Late Morning
Tucked within the festival at the historic Kalbar School of Arts and Memorial Hall, A Celebration of Lost Culinary Arts is worth seeking out. Before refrigeration and supermarkets, generations of women fed their families through creativity, resourcefulness, and deep knowledge of the land, bottling tomatoes, making jam, preserving the season's harvest for the months ahead. This free experience honours those pioneers through live demonstrations, market stalls, and the warm sense of community that surrounds traditions worth keeping alive. Visit at your own pace and stay as long as the stories hold you.
Afternoon
The day refuses to end quietly. From 3pm, The Cow Bar in Kalbar kicks on with the Harvest Hoedown, a proper celebration of country with live music, line dancing, street food, and flowing drinks that carry the afternoon into a very good Saturday night. If you've been waiting for a reason to line dance, this is it. Family-friendly, high-spirited, and packed with the kind of good old-fashioned country hospitality that the Scenic Rim does better than anywhere. Boot scootin' optional. Good times are not.
DAY 3 — Sun 28 June
Morning - Sun 28 June
Sunday offers multiple equally magnificent ways to close a weekend worth remembering.
Option 1: Farm to Table Tour with Javier Codina For those who want to go deeper, Scenic Rim Food Ambassador Javier Codina leads an exclusive full-day culinary journey that begins with breakfast at Moda before taking you behind the scenes at four of the region's hero farms, Valley Pride Produce, Heritage Poultry, Summer Land Camels, and Tommerup's Dairy Farm. At each stop, hear the farmers' stories, go behind the scenes, and savour dishes crafted directly from the produce in front of you. An immersive, moving, and thoroughly delicious way to spend the final day of Eat Local Month with one of Queensland's most passionate food ambassadors leading the way.
Option 2: For a more self-directed Sunday, the region offers three exceptional ways to spend the day. Mix, match, and move between them at your own pace.
Begin at Valley Pride Produce for Veggie Picking with the Farmer, where the Scholl family welcomes you onto their fifth-generation farm for a morning of wandering paddocks, seeing what's in season, and digging carrots, beetroot, and kale straight from the soil to take home. Honest, grounding, and genuinely joyful.
Climb aboard a vintage 1979 LandCruiser Troop Carrier at Scenic Rim Farm Shop & Café for the Progressive Paddock experience, foraging through the productive fields of Kalbar with drinks in hand before a two-course garden lunch that brings the whole weekend full circle. From the paddock to the plate, right to the very last bite.
Alternatively, head to Roadvale Hotel for a share-style Farm to Table Long Lunch in the relaxed beer garden, slow-cooked meats, house-made sourdough, seasonal vegetables, and locally crafted beverages served family-style as the afternoon stretches out before you. The perfect unhurried close to a weekend of feasting.
