The Barossa Valley is about an hour northeast of Adelaide, so we had some time to chat with Kim and learn about the history of the valley. The Valley was originally farmland until one farmer happened to grow grapes and realized it was a great area for growing them. More farmers started planting grapes to supplement their other produce, and soon the Valley was covered with over 600 vineyards. In Barossa, the grape growers aren't winemakers. The winemakers work with different farmers to harvest grapes for their vintages. The Barossa Valley has the oldest surviving grape vines in the world - a blight that has affected the rest of the world's vineyards has never reached Australia and some of the Barossa vines date back to the 1840s.
Kim took us to a little German bakery to have morning tea. We had a German pastry called Beesting Cake that is almond-flavored custard cream with honey cake topped with roasted almonds and honey. It was so rich and wonderful. It reminded me of burnt almond cake from Dick's Bakery!
After stuffing ourselves on cake, we were off to our first winery - Kellermeister/Trevor Jones. We went in to the tasting room and had a lovely view of the valley while we learned how to taste wine. We started with whites, then reds and then moved onto "fortified wines" also known as port. We did a good job of using the spitoons and not drinking too much :) My favorite wine was Kellermeister's White Tawny port. Kellermeister wines are only sold at the vineyard itself - and no where else in the world. Neither Stacy nor I bought any wine since we figured this was our first go and we had many more to try. (Little did I know the White Tawny would be my favorite of both days!)
Next we were off to Kabminye, a much smaller winery but with more of a homey feel. Our favorite tasting tender was here. He was a nice guy from Brisbane and I had a good chat with him about the city. Stacy and I felt like we were beginning to get our footing. The two of us definitely have different palates!
We ate lunch at Kaesler Vineyards. Stacy had some pasta and I had kangaroo (yum!). Of course we had wine, and a gooey-toffee-date-cake thing for dessert. After lunch we made a quick stop at the Barossa Cheese Shop. Stacy and I were stuffed from our giant lunch but we still sampled some flavorful cheeses made from local cow, sheep and goat milk.
(As an aside, just after our beautiful morning at Trevor Jones the weather got pretty fitful. There were drenching downpours about every 30 minutes and we were very glad we were either in a car or inside.)
Next, we visited Yalumba. One of the wines I drink regulary (the Scribble Gum) is a Yalumba wine, so it was nice to see where it had been made. The tasting tender was a nice and cheerful woman who could have used some Aussie 3-minute miracle. Yalumba also has an old, beat-up taxidermied sun bear that sits in their tasting room and is featured on many of their labels. (It was kind of dodgy looking...)
The last winery of the day was Langmeil. I think I liked a few of their wines but honestly everything was beginning to taste the same. By this point we had probably tasted 40 to 50 different wines and my palate is just not sophisticated enough to distinguish the finer points of a wine when I am slightly intoxicated and tired. The one wine that I know both Stacy and I liked and agreed on was the $100 bottle of Freedom that happened to be open and the tasting tender let us sample (it is not normally a tasting wine). It was amazing and now I know why people spend $100 or more on bottles of wine.
We had visited five wineries and we were ready for some dinner and some sleep. We stayed at a lovely bed and breakfast called Blickinstahl. Sue, the proprietor, made a dinner reservation for us at the local Tanunda Club and called us a cab (the only cab in town!). We had a good dinner and, being that it was Australian father's day, saw lots of Aussie families enjoying a meal as well. Dinner served to make us even sleepier and we settled in for a long evening's nap.
The next morning, we left Barossa and headed west to the Clare Valley. It was about an hour's drive and Kim continued to regale us with the history of the region, wine making and grape growing information and some of his own personal stories. (Like how he and his wife are planning on taking nine to 12 months to drive from Australia to England - yes, literally drive! It involves a few ferries and about 25,000 kilometers.)
The first winery we stopped at in the Clare Valley was Sevenhill (formerly Sevenhill monastery). This was the first winery in the Valley and it was begun to provide the friars with sacramental wine. It turned out this was such good wine that they started shipping it all over the world (and they still do today). There is only one priest left that has been trained in the wine making tradition and there is no one else to take his place. Wine makers don't want to be priests and priests don't want to be wine makers. They are trying to get another local guy to convert to Catholicism to carry on the tradition, but... Here we got to see some of the actual casks of wine and part of the bottling process. The wines we tasted were quite good and Stacy ended up buying some Semillion that she really liked.
Our next winery was Neagles - a small one right off the main road. We tried several different rieslings here (we tried many rieslings throughout the Clare since it is home to the Riesling Trail :) and were soon on our way to the next stop on our tour - Jim Barry Winery. Jim Barry is home of the Silly Mid On - a wine named after a cricket position where the player stands between the bowler and the batsman and often gets knocked out by the ball. It is a strategic but dangerous position.
After a quick lunch we visited Jeanneret, a lovely small winery at the end of a long winding road through the eucalyptus forest. The wines here were very different than the others we had tried over our previous two days. Its winemaker has no formal vintner training so he makes wine the way he thinks it should taste. It was different but very good. We finished our day in the Clare Valley at Paulett Winery on Polish Hill. It had a lovely view of the valley and some nice rieslings too.Two days, two valleys, ten wineries, one hundred vintages and two tired girls. We loved our tour but were happy to be alcohol free for a while.
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