Morning brew: Flat white coffees are a costumer favorite at Mojo Café in Wellington.

Food tasting can be enchanting for tourists. Even if the restaurants serve similar items, the tastes will almost certainly be different.

Canberra and Wellington are rarely described as culinary capitals but like hidden gems, they can surprise first-timers.

Australia’s capital Canberra is not only about politics and parliament. It also receives rich influences from different cultures, including diverse cuisine.

Wellington New Zealand — dubbed the coolest little capital in the world, according to Lonely Planet Best in Travel 2011 — shares a similar interest: promotion through culinary tourism.

Food tasting is the best way to get to know a place. Here, coffee, wine and chocolate are among the most popular delectable treats.

Coffee Tasting

Start a perfect day with perfect coffee, people say.

We lined up at The Cupping Room, a cozy café in the corner of University Avenue, Canberra. The café, whose wooden interior had a warm ambience, was full of people coming for breakfast, brunch or lunch.

“Get a sip, taste it then spit it,” said barista Hugh Kelly after greeting us for our coffee-tasting session. He led us to try four different flavors of coffee, imported from Ethiopia, Colombia, Honduras and the Himalayas.

Serving between 600 and 700 cups of coffee per day, the Cupping Room’s two baristas had to juggle in catering to the long line of visitors.

Kelly, who is this year’s Australia Barista champion, showed us how to smell and taste good coffee. Despite the fact that a lot of people drink coffee every day, there is a concern that coffee may be extinct by 2080 due to global warming if we don’t do anything, he said, citing a report from The Climate Institute.

The Cupping Room is one of the three cafes run by ONA coffee, which was founded by 2015 World Barista champion, Sasa Sestic. When you happen to be in Canberra, try the Honey Geisha coffee, which is a specialty and described as the gold label.

If ONA coffee only has three cafes, Mojo has 22 cafes in Wellington alone and eight others in Auckland. Mojo has even expanded its business to Tokyo and Xian, China.

Our tour guide Heather said that New Zealanders were very proud of their local products and therefore preferred to drink coffee brewed by local baristas instead of in overseas chains.

The coffee consumption level in New Zealand amounts to around 41 million cups per year.

 “We have a strong coffee culture,” explained Clare Kearney, a roaster at Mojo, when she met us at the chain’s headquarters and roaster at Customhouse Quay on the Wellington waterfront.

The Mojo roaster is one of 24 roasters in Wellington and the main sources of coffee are Guatemala, Ethiopia, Brazil, Colombia, Papua New Guinea and Tanzania.

Take a sip of their flat white to start your day.

Wine tasting

A personal touch can make a difference. High-school sweethearts Poppy and Shayne Hammond have proved that their wine, Poppies Martinborough, is different from others through their personal touch.

“We treat our wine as our child,” said Shayne during the wine-tasting at Martinborough, which is about one hour’s drive from Wellington. It was unfortunate that we could not meet Poppy who fell ill on the day.

Located in the heart of the small town’s vineyards, the Hammonds have created a stylish winery that also serves as a restaurant and even has a function room for private parties.

Hammond displayed different bottles for the tasting and asked which one was our favorite. For him, the Pinot Noir was his favorite although the Pinot Gris had already sold out.

A bottle to remember: Different types of wine are being displayed at the Poppies Martinborough winery in Greytown, outside of Wellington.

Exclusiveness is probably the main reason behind customers always returning to Poppies because they can only buy the wine on the spot or order it online.

Poppies sells a total of 36,000 bottles per year, and 4,200 bottles of these are red. Between 200 and 250 persons per day visit the winery, Hammond said.

The Mount Majura vineyard on the outskirts of Canberra, on the contrary, offers a wider range of wine. Occupying a 9.3-hectare site, the winery provides a self-guided trail through the vineyard although visitors must wear either gumboots or spray diluted methylated spirits on their soles to ensure no harmful pests enter the vineyard.

Mount Majura is famous for its Spanish varieties such as Tempranillo. As demand for new varieties increases the most successful wines in the region are now Shiraz and Riesling.

Chocolate tasting

Have you ever imagined having chili in your chocolate? As weird as it sounds chili flavor is available at Schoc, whose stores are located in Wellington and Greytown, about 45 minutes’ drive from the capital.

Owner and founder Murray Langham thinks of chocolate as a means of therapy.

With about 60 different flavors, Schoc offers a different experience in chocolate. It does not have only the regular flavors of strawberry or caramel but explores exotic flavors such as sea salt, pink peppercorn, carrot and coriander, and curry and papadoms. But the lime chili flavor is the new favorite.

Meanwhile, Patissez café does not sell chocolate bars but its “FreakShakes” have become known not only in its birthplace Canberra but also in Southeast Asia in such places as Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, where it already has stores.

One of the most popular menu item is the C'f-fiend, an espresso and salted-caramel shake.

The shop attendant at the small store in Manuka was happy to let us watch as she prepared our shake and we eagerly anticipated the taste.

“Yum!” the Australians said. And they were right.

“No regrets,” warned Joni Wanless, our host from VisitCanberra, when we started to complain while counting the intake of calories.

She was right. Never regret the guilty pleasure you have after drinking the shakes.

Coffee, wine and chocolate are becoming more and more popular globally, making such food-tasting an appealing culinary experience for tourists. As British celebrity chef and restaurateur Jamie Oliver put it: “Good food is a global thing and I find that there is always something new and amazing to learn”.

— Photos by JP/Primastuti Handayani

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