Barossa Valley, Pt 174, April 6^th to 8^th

Okay, for those of you keeping count, we lost several days in the record here. One was in Perth talking with Rob Healy at Encom about work possibilities (Yes, there are some). Another was flying back to Adelaide, without much trouble. Another was packing up, taking one last crack at the Internet from the Basehart’s wonderful connection and finally we headed out to the Barossa Valley, actually a fairly short drive north from Adelaide, to the Barossa Valley Tourist Park in Nuriootpa, whose name we eventually learned how to pronounce. We spent some time driving around, stopping at the “i” Center for tourist information and preparing for a day of wine tasting and more but actually most of the small wineries we were interested in were closed on Good Friday (as are most places except “servo” stations). The next day began a week-long wine festival but since they were mostly closed, and we were a little late to start tasting on the first night, we settled for a small tour including a sculpture park that overlooked the valley. Besides world-class wines, the Barossa has an active quarry with white and black marble.

The next day started with an early morning sound something like a leaf-blower on steroids. This turned out to be hot air balloons taking off from a sports field next to our trailer park on “Dawn Patrol”. They do best in the cool morning air. Cheryl got up to snap some great pictures. I scooted further under the covers. Before trying to fix breakfast, we zipped out to a farmers market in the nearby burg of Angaston. It was a great little market operating out of a wine warehouse with giant casks in the background. We bought way too much food including onions, fresh lamb chops with fresh rosemary in the package, lamb chorizo, pastries, chocolates, and some honey for breakfast. We were a little worried about buying carrots because of a food quarantine at the New South Wales border, but were told that it only applied coming into South Australia, which turned out to be true.

Well-fortified with breakfast, we set out for some shopping and sipping with a bit of Internet in Angaston. In Nuriootpa we visited Elderton Winery and then Penfold’s. Penfold’s is easily the biggest and most well-known brand in Australia. I was curious about the bin number they put on every bottle, something like “2005 Merlot Bin 321.” The “Cellar Door”, as they call tasting rooms over here, was crowded. They explained that if you find a wine of a certain year with a bin number that you liked, a wine of a different year with the same bin number was likely to taste much like the first. I mentioned “Rawson’s Retreat”, a location of some of their wines that I had seen in the States. They said that it was actually an inferior wine category that they shipped to the US. I liked the grape vines spiraling around the posts of the veranda. The real story however is in back of the tasting room where you can see several buildings with giant white tanks full of fermenting wines. Overall Penfold’s was snooty and overpriced.

Next stop was the Small Wineries cellar door in Angaston. We had a good time there talking about wine and soaking up the laid back bustle of the town. Across the street we stopped at “Small Fry Wines” owned and operated by Wayne Ahrens. This is both Wayne’s Cellar Door for 25 acres of grapes he grows out in the Valley, his winery and his home. Wayne knew Brian Croser, who I had talked to in Adelaide and thought of him as one of the fathers of the Australian wine industry. Brian had developed the Australian style for white wines where they are crushed during harvest or as soon as possible afterwards and the juice is taken off the skins quickly, to make a cleaner crisp taste. We liked Wayne’s wine and bought a bottle of white to take with us.

From there we went to the Bethany Winery, a small operation in a very old building with the winery tucked into an old rock quarry right behind the cellar door. Bethany is easily the most scenic of the wineries with many pictures of it in all seasons around the tasting room. I later saw a painting of the same scene in an art gallery in Broken Hill. Bethany had some good wines. We bought a bottle of Grenache.

The last winery we stopped at was Turkey Flats. It has some of the oldest vines in the valley. The oldest were Shiraz, over 100 years old. There were some Grenache vines by the road in, that were almost that old. Their wine was also excellent and we bought a bottle of Shiraz to take home as well as a bottle of sherry that is dangerously good, sweet and strong.

Our last stop was at Maggie Beer’s (former) restaurant and (current) storefront. It sits near a small lake on the site of her first pheasant farm. From there she went on to become a famous (unschooled) chef and purveyor of good taste throughout the country. Cheryl has a friend in Utah named Maggie Beers so that was an added draw. We tasted a little bit of a lot of her products and came away with some “burnt fig jam” we really liked. The smell of the pheasant farm however we could have done without. So travel expenses aside, this was easily our most expensive day in Australia. We were stocked up and ready for the long road back toward Queensland via “fossicking” sites inland and on the edge of the Outback.