Rose Creek Estate open day, 2 Craig St, East Keilor. Phone: 9337 5471

At 2 Craig St, East Keilor, there’s a large, two-storey but otherwise unremarkable suburban home.

There’s also 300 olive trees surrounding a vineyard and much more besides.

Including, but in no way restricted to, a fabulous garden, all sorts of fruit trees and a superb chook family.

The whole set-up is so magnificent, we’re surprised we haven’t heard about it before – or the annual open days.

Then again, it’s situated in a suburb that seems part of the west but through which we travel only on occasion but rarely (never) have a reason to stop.

Regardless, we so enjoy our visit that even if it’s a long time until we return – perhaps for the next available open day – we feel a good deal better about the world just knowing this place is where it is and as it is.

When we arrive, there seems to be a couple of hundred folks enjoying the day, with as many coming and going as we take it all in.

Indoors, there are wine and oilve oil tastings going on, and a long table replete with samples of olives, cheese and simple bruschetta of bread, parsley and oilve oil.

Before Bennie gets carried away by gorging himself on fare that is, after all, meant to be considered of the sample variety, we seek out more serious tucker.

I’d been informed somewhere along the way that pizza is often the Rose Creek open-day go.

No pizza today – instead, there’s good-looking sausages being given the heat treatment over coals and served in bread rolls with leaves and brushed with a thyme branch dipped in herby oilive oil.

Yes please!

We’re a little taken aback at the asking price of $10 – the two apiece we have been contemplating could set us back $40.

But the proof is in the eating, and on that count we have no complaints at all, and one serve each is plenty.

The bread is fresh and wonderful, the snags even better.

They’re made, I’m told, to order by a butcher to the estate’s specifications and using its pepper sauce and semillon. They’re rustically stuffed with gorgeously meaty, high-quality pork the like of which we never see in our usual pork sausages at home, regardless of where we source them.

From there, and before we score a very fine cafe latte and a hot chocolate, it’s a case of us city boys ambling all over, and up and down, sucking up what seems to us like a miraculous Mediterranean vibe in the midst of Melbourne suburbia.

Check out the Rose Creek website here.