Vino in the Barossa Valley!

Trip Start Nov 25, 2004
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Trip End Jan 26, 2005


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Wednesday, May 25, 2005

We decided to hire a car until we got to Melbourne and ended up with a very nice old man´s big, white V6 automatic! Paul pulled the short straw and was nominated driver! Even worse for him on our day trip into the Barossa Valley for a spot of wine-tasting! Driving through the Adelaide Hills was really picturesque and all the autumn colours again really made it a nice time to visit this part of the world! We visited a random tree house on the way where the first settlers had made house for a while and stopped at a stunning viewpoint for lunch with views looking out over miles & miles of vineyards!!! We decided to visit three wineries at random from the guide we had - a small, a medium and large just to see if we could spot the differences!

The first was called Bethany´s Vineyard and had a beautiful setting just as you entered the Barossa Valley but the woman was abit miserable and the wine wasn´t that good either! Cheers, none for the drives though
Cheers, none for the drives though
 ! Booooo! Nice toilet though! The second was fantastic and was called Chateau Tununda! It was in an old castle and the tasting area was actually in the cellars with huge barrels everywhere! We got to taste a 2005 white which was luscious and the lady got really into it showing us all the terms that are used to describe the taste, etc including wet wool & smelly socks!!!! Funnily enough, we ended up investing quite massively in the various wines here and started slowly filling the boot up! Our last stop was the Jacobs Creek winery as we´ve all experienced this quite massively thanks to supermarkets back home! This was huge and had a very funky bar & restaurant with floor to ceiling windows overlooking the estate! Of course the wine was extremely familiar and we really liked the Reserve Shiraz so again invested in some more for our cross country tour of Oz! I also managed to get a few cheeky extra drinks so we could take a photo! Well...it had to look authentic for the Travelpod didn´t it! Our journey home was extremely scenic once again and we were lucky enough to spot lots of kangaroos (loads more than we saw going through the centre) and even wild emus around a lake we past!

We arrived back late evening and decided to relax with take-aways and scrabble back at the apartment obviously accompanied by a couple of our recent purchases!!!! Needless to say Team Smedders Junior won...just...with a last minute stroke of genius or maybe it was the wine...we´ll let you decide!!!!
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