In her jeans and sweatshirt, with no makeup, totally natural hair and broad ocker accent, she looks as if she would be more at home rolling barrels or hauling hoses in a winery.
However, her presentations are lively, her knowledge extensive - she is a winemaker by trade, and she doesn't suffer fools kindly.
After a visit to the United Kingdom, she is fed up with wine critics complaining about the high alcohol of Australian wines before they have even tasted them to see if they are balanced.
Australia's reputation for cheap and cheerful wines is doing it a disservice, she believes.
Winemaker and travelling ambassador for Yalumba wines in South Australia's Barossa Valley, she was on an annual visit to Dunedin last week to show some of Yalumba's new-look wines.
Yalumba celebrates 160 years as a family winery next year, one of the few old Australian wineries that hasn't been taken over by multinationals.
Recently it has built a new winery for making Y series and Oxford Landing wines, and reconfigured its century-old winery at Angas in the Barossa to handle its premium wines.
It has also acquired old-established vineyards and planted new ones with selected clones, and some of the effects are beginning to show in the new wines.
Yalumba is one of the world's leading producers of viognier, a variety that was dying out in France 30 years ago but is now enjoying a renaissance.
Eden Valley Viognier 2007 (about $27) is aromatic and full in the mouth with a hint of nuts and a lovely silky texture.
It's particularly good with what she calls the "Mediterasian" style of food that's popular in restaurants in Australia and New Zealand.
The classiest of the wines she showed was the Yalumba Eden Valley Wild Ferment Chardonnay 2007 (about $22), a beautifully balanced, restrained wine with hints of nuts and pipfruit, a background of stylish oak and a long crisp finish that I imagine will develop over the next three or four years.
South Australian Grenache used to make fortified wines for the British empire but the old vineyards now produce some stylish varietal wines.
Yalumba Bush Vine Barossa Grenache 2007 (about $23), a lovely blend of berry fruit with savoury Marmite and rosemary overtones, is a delicious, quaffable wine.
Shiraz, lifted with a little viognier, as is traditional in Cote Roti in France's Rhone Valley, is now a fashionable blend and Yalumba Barossa Shiraz Viognier 2005 (about $23) is one of those wines that is pleasant enough by itself, but partner it with smoked or char-grilled meat and it lifts the whole experience to another level.
At her lunch at Table Seven it was served with a smoked pork with butternut and feta tart and pear wonton.
The Australian wine glut a few years ago enabled Yalumba to acquire fruit from some prestigious older vineyards in the Barossa and much of that, along with fruit from new vineyards, has now gone into its new Patchwork Shiraz 2006 (about $23), a perfumed spicy wine oozing rich fruit but backed by toasty oak and supple tannins and a lingering finish.
