Now in their sixth year of owning the McIlroys Rd property, Hannah and Roger Stuart-Andrews are proud of  their newly created wetlands. Both are on the Committee of Management for the Coolart Wetland Wildlife Reserve, they’re bird people, and love the constant parade of visiting waders.

Though they’ve had a house at McCrae for 30 years and the kids grew up on the peninsula in the beach house,Roger and Hannah’s professions kept them mostly city-bound - until 2006 when they moved to the peninsula full time.

“Basically, we just love it here. We recently returned after a two month holiday and walked around the garden – it was just bliss among the jonquils, watching the coots and swamp hens on the wetlands,” said Roger. “I just love looking out the window, it’s always green - even through those driest months it was green. The garden’s always got something of interest in it,” said Hannah.

“There’s the chestnut tree that we put a hammock under and lie there in the summer, the satisfaction of picking your own vegies, eggs from our own chooks, we love making chutneys and sauces from tomatoes we grow in the summer – the rural life.”

Roger is a dentist of many years experience – now a historian at La Trobe Uni doing Post Graduate research into the history of Pitcairn Island and the Bounty mutineers: “trying to solve the mystery of what happened to Fletcher Christian”.

Hannah is an anaesthetist who was, at the time of writing, still working a couple of days a week at Frankston Hospital and the Austin Hospital.

“I’ve spent a lot of time in hospital basement operating theatres,” said Hannah, “I enjoy sending people to sleep!

“But that work history certainly heightens the appreciation of standing in the vineyard. From being underground I now see daylight – all day.”

For Roger too, the move from strictly controlled environments, to moving with the seasons and days is a liberation: “Everything in our jobs was so pedantic, exact and precise because people’s lives and health were involved.

“In wine you can’t do that – everything changes and you change with it. One of the joys for us is in doing almost the opposite of what we’d been doing all those 35 years – now it’s all moving with the environment, with everything around us – the seasons, wind, sun, rain. If it’s a calm day, you spray. It’s things like this: We woke up one day and there were cattle eating our grapes, having pushed through the fence!”

The other great difference to the path Roger and Hannah had travelled until recently was that their work went largely unseen: “nobody knew it was beautiful because nobody could see it!”

Seeing a Dunns Creek labelled bottle win gold is all the more sweet for that.

The medical backgrounds and influence don’t stop with the Stuart- Andrews: when Hannah found a vineyard manager who was a former obstetrician “I said ‘I have to have him!’. He can look after our grapes as he used to look after babies!”

Roger can be seen trundling around the lanes of the peninsula in ‘Freda; – a 1926 Morris Commerical Truck emblazoned with the Dunns Creek logo and contact details.

“The locals have plenty of time to admire her and to note the website on her tailgate because passing places are not frequent and her top speed is only 30kph!”