In spring the morning light comes off Gulf St Vincent along Normanville Beach, and a few kilometres inland, on Main Street, Yankalilla, the benches at Lot 50 wait for flour. Jackie Mazzocato and her husband John built Fleurieu Food and Wine (opens in a new window) from Normanville on a goal most people would keep to themselves, and the Maggie Beer Fleurieu comparison she chose for herself was always about the dream, the produce and the people.

Behind the Maggie Beer Fleurieu comparison: a goal and a dream

Jackie traces the whole business to one pattern in her life: her memories and experiences, she says, have always been tied to people and food. When she and John started Fleurieu Food and Wine, she did not aim small. “I had a Big Hairy Audacious Goal,” she says, and she measured it against a cook from another valley.

Maggie and Colin Beer settled in the Barossa in 1973 to breed pheasants and grow grapes, and Maggie cooked from what that valley grew. That is the part Jackie took for her own coast. “I have always related to her food values,” she says, and those values point at the farm gate, not the spotlight.

The Barossa had its pheasants. Normanville has Normanville Beach (opens in a new window), 7.3 kilometres of sand on Gulf St Vincent with the town at its middle, the cellar doors and distilleries of the peninsula behind it, and growers across the Fleurieu whose work ends up on her benches. “I love the region and wanted to share it with others,” Jackie says. The classes became the way to do that, never the point of it.

Steak from the Coorong, milk from Myponga

Ask Jackie what matters and she starts with where the food comes from. A steak from the Coorong and milk from Myponga each name a place before they name a dish, and for Jackie that origin is the story: the region tells itself through what it raises.

The people come next, and they come close. Serving a plate was never the whole point, she says; the point was “the sharing of a table, a joke a glass and a region.” She wants guests to find Fleurieu Food and Wine “approachable and professional”, and she talks about “the multi-generational team we have built” with more pride than any dish.

That team is where the dream shows first. At the door of a class, the welcome often comes from Jackie’s young foodie, who greets each guest and is learning how a small business on the Fleurieu is run. Another young woman on the team, with Jackie as her mentor, has started a business of her own. Behind the camera is a young photographer who wanted to explore his love of photography, and the classes give him flour, flame and faces to point his lens at. Then there is the staff member who first came to a Fleurieu Food and Wine class having never cooked at all, now works confidently for us, and every week volunteers at Meals on Wheels.

Jackie tells that story on purpose. Fleurieu Food and Wine began as a couple in Normanville with a goal too big to say out loud, and it now carries its benches from Yankalilla to Milang without owning a bricks and mortar venue. She wants the younger cooks on her team, and anyone with a plan put away in a drawer, to see that they can be “anything they want to be and from a small seaside town like Normanville.”

Awards came into the story too. Fleurieu Food and Wine won Gold at the 2025 South Australian Tourism Awards, was back in the running in 2026 as the Fleurieu Sun (opens in a new window) reported, and came home with Bronze on 6 November: two years of medals for a small seaside town. Jackie’s congratulations go to every finalist on the night.

What a seat at Jackie’s bench gives you

A class with Fleurieu Food and Wine is two and a half hours of your own hands in the work, in a small group, with a recipe book to take home. At Lot 50 that means pasta, gnocchi or dumplings on the bench; at Bungala House, the old Yankalilla homestead, it means the smell of the hibachi and lunch at the table.

The guests who return say the most about it. More than 30 per cent come back for another class, and Jackie loves watching a new face become “part of the family on their fourth or fifth class.” She learns their stories, and the food memories that once tied them to other people at other tables. Asked what stays with her, she keeps it short: “It is the smile they leave with!”

What does her partner in crime think

John Mazzocato, the other half of Fleurieu Food and Wine, is proud to work with Jackie, and he will admit he is a little scared, now and then, of what her mind can dream up next. Living beside the person who sets a Big Hairy Audacious Goal means never quite knowing what the next one will ask of him.

What keeps John at the bench is closer to home. Jackie is the person who shares his food memories and his family memories, and for a business built on the idea that memories are tied to people and food, that is the partnership at its centre. Ask John why it works and he points to two things: approachability, so guests who have never cooked feel at ease, and the partnerships and the team the couple have built, from Cut Hill Wall Distillery, Hastwell and Lightfoot and the Milang Lakeside Butter Factory to the young cooks, the photographer and the volunteer on the multi-generational team.

What 2027 looks like: two generations at the bench, and a potato with your face on it

The next big idea is a community one. Class by class, at Lot 50, Bungala House and the other rooms we cook in, we have watched guests slow down, breathe out and take in where they are: the old homestead, the floured benches on Main Street, the coast and country around them. In 2027 Fleurieu Food and Wine wants to grow that social side of the business on purpose.

Two series sit at the centre of the plan. The first is a kids in the kitchen series, built to connect generations so that young and old cook together at the same bench. The second is a seniors connection series, carrying the same idea of company around food to older cooks on the coast. Both need funds before they can have dates, and we are raising them now.

Jackie, true to form, already has the fundraising idea. It is called Tatagrams: your mug shot on a potato, which you take home, plant and grow into a crop of your own.

Backing the dream asks very little of you, and there are three ways to do it:

• Like, share or comment on a post on the Fleurieu Food and Wine Facebook page (opens in a new window), so the two series reach people who have not yet heard of them.
• Come to a class. Pick a date and a bench on our classes page (opens in a new window), and bring a friend who has never cooked.
• Get your mug shot on a potato at the Tatagrams launch at Lot 50, 64 Main Street, Yankalilla, on Sunday 29 November, then put it in the ground at home.

By the time a Tatagram potato is ready to dig, Jackie hopes the money it raised will have put two generations side by side on the benches of Lot 50, flour on their hands, which is where this whole goal began.

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