Colin's master food and wine touch

After years of being harangued by friends to enrol for the cooking show, his wife Fiona took it upon herself to fill out an application.

"From when the show first started, I had friends saying I should go on it, but I was always too busy," Colin said.

"In the end, Fiona almost finished the application without me knowing but there were some questions she just couldn't answer. She said 'I'm going to send it anyway so you might as well give me the correct answers'."

Once the application was in the mail, Colin said his competitive streak came out.

"I really wanted to get in," he said.

Not only did he get in, Colin made it all the way through to the top 10 of this year's series - not bad for a builder from Melbourne.

About 10 years ago, Colin and Fiona made a "vine change" and moved to the Barossa Valley.

"I started coming to the Barossa about 20 years ago, and fell in love with wine," he said.

"I kept asking winemakers to let me do a vintage just for fun.

In 2004, Colin finally had the opportunity to do a vintage.

"I came over just for four weeks for fun," he said.

"At the end of the month I rang up my wife and said I'd bought a vineyard and we were moving."

With a two-week cooling off period, Fiona flew over for a look and the rest, as they say, is history. Flaxman Wines, at Flaxman Valley, was born.

"I basically packed in my building business, came over here and had a go at winemaking," Colin said.

Wine and good food traditionally go hand in hand - especially in the Barossa - so it should be no surprise that a winemaker would have an appreciation for fine fare.

But Colin's love for food started well before his move.

"I suppose my mum wasn't a very good cook," he said.

"Very old school, meat and three veg, everything overcooked."

When his parents went away on weekends, one of Colin's sisters would stay home and cook dinner, on the proviso he would sit and talk with her.

"I watched her cook, and she's a very good cook, and that's where I started to pick up the basics.

"And eating her food, which was so much better than mum's, really made me want to eat better and better food.

"Then I started eating at restaurants and when I ate that sort of food, I wanted to be able to cook it, so I just kept pushing myself to cook more and more."

Fast forward to 2014 and the boy who loved good food was living in a house with 23 other people who hold the same passion.

"The vast majority of the time it was really good fun," Colin said of his MasterChef experience.

"Like anything in life, it's not fun all the time; there's the stress of cooking, the stress of constantly being judged, and the stress of living in a house with 23 other people."

Despite that, Colin said he was "really pleased" he shared his experience with the people he competed with for more than four months.

"I think if you didn't get on as well as we did it would be a nightmare living in the house," he said.

The overall experience of being filmed and judged on TV was intense, he said, but that encouraged him to focus.

* Full report in Stock Journal, August 28, 2014 issue.