Southwest Nature and Wine Drive - Britz

Four nights in a loop from Perth in a campervan, through four wine regions and the tall forest country of the south west.

Harvey and the Logue Brook Dam come first, then Bunbury and the Ferguson Valley, a small inland wine region with a strange and locally famous garden of carved gnomes, and Busselton with its two-kilometre jetty.

Dunsborough and Margaret River follow, where the vineyards sit between the surf breaks and the limestone caves, and the Boranup Forest nearby is karri regrowth with trees already sixty metres tall. Nannup, Pemberton and Manjimup come next, the last of them the centre of Australian black truffle production, harvested from June to August and now rivalling the French crop in volume, with Bridgetown on the way back to Perth.

Britz supply the camper and the day-by-day plan, and the hire is priced live per vehicle rather than per person; campsites, fuel, ferries, park fees and activities are all extra, with a nil-excess insurance pack available at booking. Five days leaves time to stop properly, which is the point of it, and cellar doors across the region mostly close by five. A camper also solves the usual difficulty with a wine trip, which is the drive back to the hotel afterwards. Autumn brings the vintage and winter the truffles, so the season depends on which is the draw. The forest is the thing that stays with people rather than the wine: karri grows to seventy metres and there is nowhere else in the world it does so.