If you are planning a golf trip to the Hunter, any time is a great time to take in the sights of wine country. But summer is perhaps the most vibrant and exciting time. Towards the end of January, vintage begins and the Hunter Valley becomes alive with both hand and machine picking in the vineyards. Warm days mean mornings on the course, afternoons exploring the vineyards and evenings cooling by the pool with a glass of local wine in your hand.

November through to March is also Day On The Green concert season when wineries, like Bimbadgen and Roche Estate, play host to local and international acts. The likes of Paul Kelly, Bernard Fanning, Missy Higgins and Ian Moss as well as Sting and The Killers are scheduled to perform this summer.

But golf remains a year-round attraction for visitors to wine country and the mainstay has long been the Cypress Lakes Resort.

The course celebrated its 30th anniversary this year and much has changed since American designer Steve Smyers signed off on the project. Back then, the clubhouse was a small building that still stands near the 1st green. By 1995, the hub of the layout was relocated to a luxurious resort building and luxury villas that now cover the hillside overlooking the course.

Cypress Lakes Resort. PHOTO: Brendan James.

After several years of decline in the 2000s, a change of ownership in 2013 brought much needed investment into the course as well as the resort and both have been improving ever since.

The resort, now known as Oaks Cypress Lakes Resort, was named Australia’s Best Golf Hotel in 2018 and, again, in 2021. The course also made it back into the national ranking. It was ranked by this magazine as the No.97 Public Access Course in Australia for 2017, after disappearing from all ranking lists for nearly six years. In 2021, it was ranked No.66 and expectations are it will rise again when the ranking is published again in January 2023.

If you haven’t visited Cypress Lakes in recent years, you’re in for a really pleasant surprise. All of the layout’s bunkers have been renovated and some greens have been slightly tweaked as a result of that work.

There are plenty of highlights here. The opening quartet of holes – including a reachable par-5, two tough par-4s and a long par-3 – set the tone for a fun and challenging round, but it is Cypress Lakes’ penultimate offering that I have always enjoyed playing.

The Vintage. PHOTO: Brendan James.

Your line off the tee is influenced by the pin position of the day as the 337-metre par-4 has two fairways – one low and another high – either side of deep bunkers cut into the slope between the two fairways. The ‘low road’ to the right is always my preference, despite having to possibly hit over the greenside lake to get near the flag.

Of course, if you are going to play Cypress Lakes, why not indulge yourself by staying at the resort. The one-, two- and three-bedroom villas are luxurious, with many overlooking the course. Other facilities include tennis courts, three swimming pools and fitness centre as well as two restaurants and bars.

Cypress Lakes’ nearest golfing neighbour is The Vintage, just a few minutes’ drive north into the heart of the Pokolbin wine growing area.

Designed by Greg Norman and Bob Harrison, The Vintage is an impressive layout where risk-and-reward elements of the design abound and its overall conditioning is always first class, which is why it is cemented in the Top-100 Courses and Top-100 Public Access Courses ranking of this magazine.

The course ventures into varying pockets of The Vintage’s expansive site. The opening holes are tight and tree-lined before moving across the property’s most undulating land for the latter half of the front nine. The back nine is more open and mostly flatter but with more water in play.

RIGHT: Kurri Kurri Golf Club. PHOTO: Brendan James.

Consistent throughout are the huge, flashy bunkers synonymous with the Greg Norman/Bob Harrison designs – including Sanctuary Lakes, The Glades, Brookwater and Pelican Waters – that opened for play in the 2000s.

The 7th and 8th holes are arguably among the best at The Vintage. The 503-metre 7th features an enormously wide fairway with only a couple of innocuous fairway bunkers and distant out-of-bounds along the left side as complications, so a long drive that bounds over the hill leaves a very real chance of reaching this par-5 in two blows. However, the neighbouring Bimbadgen Estate vineyard draws closer along the left side the nearer to the green play gets and any attempt at finding the surface in two hits needs to skirt this left side to counter the terrain. And once on board, the green features a bowl in the front section that can help or hinder approaches to certain pin positions.

The next is a white-knuckle par-3 that can be played as long as 190 metres from the tips to 121 metres from the forward green tees, depending on your skill or penchant for a challenge. The lake against the right edge of the green is impossible to delete from the mind as you address your ball, while a scheme of three bunkers on the left can, in places, present an only marginally better ‘miss’.

Another wine country layout worth playing is Hunter Valley Golf & Country Club, which covers easy walking terrain opposite Cessnock Airport at the southern gateway to the dozens of wineries in the area.

Work on the course started in the early ‘90s but the welcome mat was not thrown down to golfers until 1998. Since then, the course has had several name changes and owners but it stands today as part of an impressive Crowne Plaza Resort complex and the obvious investment made in the layout can be seen in the fantastic presentation of the course with well-manicured Santa Ana couch fairways and bentgrass greens.