Hinterland Heritage Wine Tour from Brisbane with lunch included

In the volcanic folds of the Gold Coast hinterland lies a wine region many Queenslanders have yet to discover.

Here, cellar doors occupy colonial homesteads, and subtropical grape varieties thrive where they would not in the Barossa or Hunter.

There is even an alpaca farm set within a working vineyard.

This is the Hinterland Heritage Wine Tour, the experience Cooee Tours is best known for.

The tour travels through three wine valleys:

Tamborine Mountain, Canungra Valley and the Albert River corridor.

It includes three cellar doors, tastings at each stop, about 45 minutes per venue, and a dedicated driver, so no one in your group has to volunteer to drive.

At Albert River Wines, tastings take place in a heritage Queenslander and colonial homestead on the riverbank.

The house, now the cellar door, was once home to three Queensland Premiers.

At O'Reilly's Canungra Valley Vineyards, the tasting is held beside Killowen, a homestead

built in Warwick in 1858 and moved to the site in 1989; the vines were planted by more

than 150 locals and first harvested in March 2000.

Next door, Mountview Alpaca Farm lets guests feed and walk an alpaca among the vines.

Mount Nathan Winery has been in the Gibson family since the 1850s and serves a honey wine

that often draws more comment than anything else on the circuit.