It’s 10am on Friday. I’ve just landed in Melbourne, Australia’s epicurean capital, in time for the final weekend of the Melbourne food and wine festival.

But the airport is as close as I’m getting to the city this trip; I’m here to hit four events of the festival’s final weekend, when the spotlight shifts to regional Victoria. I’m going to eat lunch at a vineyard outside Ballarat, sip 1960s-themed cocktails in Bendigo, go out on a mussel boat in Port Phillip Bay, learn cooking techniques from chefs Nathan Outlaw, Peter Gilmore and Aaron Turner, and blend my own gin on the Mornington peninsula.

You’ll be able to follow my adventures over the next three days as I discover some of Victoria’s best food and drink on this 700km drive.

Regional World’s Longest Lunch – Coghills Creek, Eastern Peake Vineyard

We’re in the country, on a warm Friday afternoon, where you don’t hurry a long lunch – and this looks set to be a very long lunch indeed. There are 21 of these events being held around Victoria today and they are all required to run from 12 until at least 4pm.

Not long after midday, I’m sampling a sparkling Eastern Peake pinot tache in the corrugated iron shed that doubles as the cellar door when the coach bringing most of the guests arrives from Ballarat, 30km away. Outside on the grass – after a hot, dry summer, there is little green to be seen – is a very long table set for 101 people.

It’s after one when we take our seats for the first of four courses, a duck and potato terrine. Wines by Eastern Peake and nearby Dalwhinnie and Mount Langi Ghiran slosh into glasses (there are three wines to sample with each savoury course; the pours are so generous that I’m soon glad I’m driving and can only taste). “Any vegos in the vicinity?” one waitress bellows.

No one near me answers, least of all the diner opposite. He’s Alistair Jones, who with his father Robert runs the Tuki retreat and trout farm, and grew the trout and lamb we’re eating today. (A lot of people pat him on the shoulder as the afternoon wears on, and one complete stranger gets him out of his chair for a hug.)

Over second course – a bright, bold eggplant ravioli prepared by Rosa Mitchell of Rosa’s Kitchen in Melbourne – the self-described “grape-crusher” beside me, John Harris of Mitchell Harris Wines, enthuses about the burgeoning food scene in Ballarat, where he and his business partner opened a wine bar a year ago. John’s date for the day is his mate Craig McKenzie, a barista-turned-“flavour alchemist” who imports single-origin cocoas through his company Grounded Pleasures. He tells me about the “chocolatorium” behind his house and outlines his theory of vice management, which entails ingesting anything you like, as often as you like, as long as it doesn’t interfere with your ability to talk, really talk, to the people you meet along the way.

I’d been a bit uneasy at the prospect of spending four hours sitting with people I’d never met. But we all love food and wine and so the conversation, like the wine, never runs dry. It’s like the best sort of country wedding, with all the boring bits left out.

The main course – flavourful Tuki lamb with an heirloom tomato salad – is enlivened by an hour-long, occasionally heated argument about the merits of screw caps versus corks. But the real excitement comes before our berry dessert when the wind gets up and suddenly a willy-willy is blowing glasses off the table. It blasts two shade umbrellas inside out and lifts one woman right out of her seat. (“Don’t wear red shoes to Eastern Peake,” our host, Norman Latta, later tells me.)

It’s 5pm by the time we push our chairs back. Time to hit the road to Bendigo for cocktails and retro glamour at the Dispensary Enoteca, a jewel of a gastrobar in the goldrush city. The evening promises a night of Bond-themed cocktails and a menu to match: prawn and yabby cocktails come with a mint julep; marron thermidor is accompanied by a vesper martini. And dessert? A baked Alaska served with a blue Hawaii wearing its own pink paper cocktail umbrella. Now that’s really taking a theme and embracing it.

• Guardian Australia was a guest of the Melbourne food and wine festival and Tourism Victoria. We stayed at Fountain View Suites in Bendigo