You walk into a cheese store. Try several cheeses. The bubbly assistant tells you she is yawning because she has been awake since 4am. Doing what, you ask? Milking the cows.

This is the connection between producers and produce in the Adelaide Hills. It’s all very symbiotic and intimate, whether it’s the wine, the chefs or the cheeses.

The Adelaide Hills can be overshadowed, even scoffed at, by locals. At least that’s what Mark from Nepenthe wines tells me. The Barossa, McLaren Vale and Clare Valley have reputations as brassy and bold as their juice, but the Hills can be overlooked.

Adelaide Hills has some big players, but on the scale of South Australia’s wine industry, they rank small. A highlight is the boutique vineyards that produce small batches – when I say small, that’s around 30,000 bottles of one variety.

Mount Lofty Vineyards runs four and a half hectares of land and produces all the wine served at its restaurant. While it is a cellar door, you’d be remiss to skip the restaurant with its open pit fireplace and crocheted blankets hung higgledy-piggledy on the backs of odds and evens chairs.

The real pleasure here is the intimacy between the vines you are looking at and the wine you quaff. And the food, of course. The staff will direct the right pairing for the course. I started with a Riesling for the kingfish ceviche starter and moved onto Pinot noir for the main course.

Bread with more seeds than soft comes with a double up of oil as well as the kitchen’s own churned butter with a salt crust. The lamb main course comes with eggplant and eggplant puree, as well as a sauce that the kitchen harvested from their herb garden backyard. Dessert is a powdery affair of a deconstructed apple crumble. Micro apple pieces sit among red flowers and a sneeze-inducing pile of crumble and cinnamon.

Shaw and Smith is a much bigger business, and is easily one of the most slick and Scandinavian styled wine tasting I have seen. First of all, the tasting occurs while seated on pale birch wood chairs and white tables with paper placemats denoting a circle for each wine glass. This is a five flight experience and the guide helpfully points out to the designated drivers among the Adelaide Hills that all five will set you back two standard drinks.

Sauvignon Blanc is ubiquitous with the Shaw and Smith label, in fact, many tasters do not even realise that they produce red wine. The highlight of the tasting is a Riesling that they sell only at the cellar door. Worth the visit alone.

The produce is as locally sourced as possible. At Pike and Joyce, another cellar door cum restaurant, the seasonal special is full of the region’s own Lenswood apples.

After all that wine and dine, what more? Chocolate and cheese is what. Woodside Cheese Wrights is pretty much the fondue dream in a store. Not that it is trading in fondue; rather it is the cheeses of local artisan cheese maker Kris.

There are a half dozen buffalo milk cheeses on offer, which may well be the new goat’s cheese. We all know buffalo mozzarella, but there are many ways to make it. The cheese store has a sample bar of crackers, hard cheese, soft cheese, jelly and relishes. There’s even a baked brie with herbs fresh out of the oven with an onion relish.

The cheese shop is conveniently right next store to a chocolate shop, which appeals with a back to basics selection of childhood sweets. Bags of liquorice bullets, frogs, caramel buds and candies are a sugar high for the kids and a nostalgic hit for the adults.

The milk that our early-riser friend was drawing was for the cheese at Udder Delights, found in Hahndorf. They have a cheese here that costs $300 a kilo, as it is a raw blue. Hahndorf is the oldest German settlement in the Southern Hemisphere, and is a quaint street studded with sandstone cottages.

For pure quirk, head to the leather goods store that looks like a tin shed from the era of Ned Kelly. Steer your way over the uneven floors – signposted as such, just in case – to the back of the store, where there is a mud warren filled with very large rabbits as well as some babies. Yes, it’s as surreal as it sounds. Thankfully they’re pets.

Bakeries advertise cherry strudel and black forest cake and bee sting slices. Shops sell lederhosen and cuckoo clocks. There’s beer and bratwurst and sauerkraut at the pubs, more beer halls, channelling the German heritage for a rather exotic experience just 20 minutes out of Adelaide.

WHERE TO STAY:

Crafers hotel has recently been refurnished and is the ideal of a country hotel, bar and restaurant. Downstairs, the eateries are filled with locals. There’s a wine room that impresses even the winemaker we have dinner with who disappears for at least ten minutes. Upstairs, the rooms have extravagantly high ceilings, a fireplace, brown leather king size beds, and French doors for windows. The bathroom is the length of the bedroom, and the deep and long bath is the first order of business. It is stocked with Aesop products. A bath, a pot of tea, by the fireplace looking out at the russet leaves of the Adelaide hills is as country and comforting a stay as you could want on a weekend getaway.