G'Day!

Barossa - Adelaide Today we pack our bags, clean up the B&B and head out to Adelaide. But first we need to visit Wayne Dutschke to get a couple of bottles of his wonderful Muscat and to sign his barrel of fortified Shiraz. We also check out the hole in his front yard that suddenly appeared after recent heavy rains; its apparently the shaft of an old gold mine. Then it is on into Adelaide and lunch at the National Wine Centre of Australia. After a quick tour around the exhibits John drops us at Pacific International Apartments and heads out to the airport and home to Brisbane. Thanks for all the hard work putting such a great few days together, Big Brother!

Barossa - Day 5 There are only two vineyards on the itinerary today, but what a day! First is Hutton Vale, named over 150 years ago. A mixed production farm making jams and chutneys as well as wine. The owners, John and Jan Angus, provide great hospitality and a tasting of excellent wines. The viticulture practices, including use of a large fan to combat frost on the shiraz vines, are explained by John during a trip through the vineyard in the company of the family dogs. The second vineyard we visit is Heathvale, another old property dating back to the 1860s, that is now owned by Trevor and Faye March. Trevor is clearly an enthusiastic vigneron, and it shows as he takes us on a walk through the vines and explains the ages of the vines and the different trellising methods he is using to gain optimal flavors in the grapes. His wines, especially the 2002 Shiraz, are wonderful. On the way back to Tanunda we stop in at the Eden Valley Pub for a pizza and some Irvine merlot. Later that evening dinner is at Salters where we finish off the Heathvale 2002 Chardonnay and the 2002 Shiraz kindly provided by Trevor. It’s a pity that the meal is spoiled by air conditioning that is blasting out super cold air, and coffee that takes forever to get to our table.

Barossa - Day 4 Today Ngaire and Chris head back to Dubbo, and Miranda wants to check out Real Estate in Tanunda which leaves John and I to do wineries. First on the list is a fairly ordinary range of wines at Elderton. Next is Bethany Wines which boasts a great view from the cellar door, and some interesting aged Rieslings. However the best range of wines comes next at Liebichwein. These are wines made in the old style with big, bold tannins. They will need years to settle down. Last is another adequate but not exciting range of wines from St Hallett Winery, and then its time for lunch at the Krondorf Café. Dinner that night is at Barr Vinum, and a taste off between Dutschke 2002 St Jakobi Shiraz and Summerfield 2002 Shiraz.

Barossa - Day 3 First on the agenda today is a trip out to the infant winery of rising star Troy Kalleske. John has been able to organize a private tasting with this amazingly young, but after being anointed by Robert Parker, now internationally known winemaker. The winery is only several years old and much of the operation is still being done in Troy’s brother’s big tin shed. As we walk toward the shed some very serious barking emanates from the side of the house. Its Tyson, a Tyrolean Shepard, who is a monster of a dog; but not in the Wine Dogs book. Troy says he friendly and he’s released to bound up and greet us. Through Troy’s generosity we taste through some amazing examples of Shiraz and Grenache. The Grenache wines are wonderful spicy wines, almost Christmas cake in a glass, and the Shiraz is certainly outstanding. The top of the line, the 2003 Johann Georg Shiraz, comes from vines that go back to 1875 and some of the fruit used to go into the greatest Australian wine Penfolds Grange. By the amount of drooling he does, Tyson seems to envy our enjoyment of the wines. Before we leave I ask Troy if he would autograph a magnum of his 2003 Shiraz for me. Thanks Troy! That bottle is going into the cellar for a loooong time. The next winery is Torbreck Vintners. One of the most impressive things about Torbreck is that almost all of their wines are available for tasting, unlike a number of wineries who hold back their top line wines. The Torbreck wines, especially the 2003 Descendent, are very impressive. Their icon wine, Run Rig, is outstanding, but for my money it is pipped at the post by the Descendent. The next winery is Veritas where we are served by Mrs Binder. The first wine she serves us is the 2004 Mrs Binder Barossa Riesling. It’s a wine that the advertising blurb says was specially made for her and I would imagine that she deserves it. When most people would be retired she is busy serving wines quietly but effectively to anyone who walks in the door. Good-onya Mrs Binder! Lunch is a Maggie Beer’s little establishment overlooking a small lake. The food is quite excellent but we have to rush through it as we have to meet Matt Wenk to taste his Smidge wines. Matt is also winemaker for Two Hands and so we head out there but we arrive late and are told he has gone on to the Branson winery, where he is also the winemaker. Branson is also a little hard to find but after wandering around, or maybe its through Seppeltsfield, we see the fermenter shed on stilts that we were told to look for. The tasting with Matt is one of the most interesting experiences we have during our Barossa trip. We taste his bottled wines, especially his 2002 Zinfandel, The Tardy, and then head into the barrel shed. This is where it gets educational. Matt has 2004 Zinfandel in French oak barrels from Langhorne Creek that was fermented using different yeasts. The wines are completely different, ripe fruits of blackberry/blueberry in one case, more subdued spices of nutmeg in the other. But the wine to watch for is the 2004 from Barossa fruit. It apparently will be called The Donald. This wine is more typical of zinfandel, spicy and fragrant, and covers the palate with ripe, intense fruit flavors. Matt also lets us taste the Two Hands 2003 Ares shiraz from barrel as well as its sister wine the Aphrodite, made from Cabernet sauvignon. The 2003 and 2004 Aphrodite are outstanding wines. The 2003 Ares is one of the best wines I’ve tasted. Many thanks to Matt for a great tasting, and the bottle of The Tardy! The last winery for the day is Thorn-Clarke. Miranda obviously does not want to destroy the memory of the Smidge/Two Hands wines and stays in the car while the rest of us go through their line-up. The best wine is clearly the 2002 William Randell Shiraz. Dinner is at 1918, and this time everyone is ready for wine. First up is The Doctor Sparking Red from The Willows Vineyard. Entrees are with Smidge Wines 2002 The Tardy Zinfandel. Main meals are over a comparison of Greenock Creek 2001 Alices Shiraz and Torbreck 2003 The Struie.

Barossa - Day 2 The first winery on our second day is Kellermeister Wines, also home to Trevor Jones wines; a father/son operation. We are a little bit early and have to wait while the staff set up the tasting room and cash register. Once all is ready we taste through a very diverse array of wines. Some are excellent like the 2003 Trevor Jones Vintage Virgin Chardonnay, while the Pink Mink is, hmmm, interesting! All in all we taste some 16 different wines. Spitting is certainly the order of the day for those of us who are not embarrassed to do so. The next visit is with winemaker Wayne Dutschke. My brother John is a great admirer of Dutschke Wines and has asked Wayne to show us his current line. It would be little exaggeration to say that this visit is a highlight of our Barossa wine experience. It is very obvious that Wayne Dutschke not only loves to talk about his wines and wine in general, but that he also makes outstanding wines. Its clear Wayne is serious about us tasting his wines when he pulls out a set of the largest glasses I’ve ever seem. It immediately occurs to me that if I put my nose in there its very likely to get lost and never find its way out! His two shiraz wines, the 2002 St. Jakobi and the 2002 Oscar Semmler, are intense and seamless, and among the best we will taste in the next five days. We also get to taste a range of barrel samples of both dry and fortified wines. It’s a great shame that these wonderful fortified wines are made in such limited quantities. I notice that Miranda is not spitting anything out at all but by the end of the tasting she is doing an awful lot of smiling and swaying. An interesting sidelight to the Dutschke experience is the invitation to sample a coffee made from beans that have been soaked in port. Its still in the experimental stages but there is a taste of port there. After such great hospitality we are pleased that Wayne accepts John’s invitation to join us for lunch at 1918, a well known bistro and grill in Tanunda, where we finish off those opened bottles of Dutschke wine. The food is impressive enough for us to reserve a table for dinner on Tuesday night. Rockford is the next stop where John is a member of the Stonewallers which allows us to get a more private tasting in the Stonewall Cellar. The buildings at Rockford really are stonewalls and very quaint. The smell of burnt ash from the fireplace in the Stonewall Cellar would also be quite quaint under any other circumstances but we are here to taste wines. I come away somewhat less impressed with Rockford and their wines than I thought I would be. Glaetzer is also not as impressive as expected. This might be due to the first wine that we are shown, a Sparkling Pinot Noir, being corked. Last winery on the list for today is Turkey Flat Vineyards. This winery is just outside Tanunda and has some of the oldest shiraz vines in the Barossa. Its no wonder then that their Shiraz is sold out, so we try some very tasty Cabernet Sauvignon instead. Miranda doesn’t taste anything here or at Glaetzer; I think she is still savoring the taste of Dutschke Muscat. Dinner is at La Buona Vita. Pizza and yes, you guessed correctly, no one has the palate left for any more wine.

Barossa - Day 1 Our first day of wine tasting. We are all little groggy from the night before but breakfast is a great help and the wines of the Barossa await. I’m not going to provide any detailed notes on individual wines here, just general impressions. If you want more information you can look either at my Shiraz eBlog or at my Tasting Notes eBlog. First up is the ultra modern Two Hands Wines. The most impressive wines we taste here are the perfumed 2003 Lily’s Garden (a McLaren Vale shiraz) and the spicy 2003 Sophie’s Garden (Padtheway shiraz). Next is Seppeltsfield winery. Here taste some of their sparking shiraz. The Australian answer to champagne? Possibly not, but a uniquely Aussie drop of plonk. We’ll taste a number of these over the next few days, some of which are very, very good. Seppelts gives us two to sample their 2002 and their 1994 Show Sparkling. The latter is clearly the better wine. Very earthy, with characters of the barnyard, but soft and elegant in the mouth. But we are here for the fortified wines and so we move into the tasting of the Rare series of Muscat, Tokay, and Tawny and the 1983 Para Tawny. Miranda is in her element here, throwing wine everywhere as she tries to get every last nuance of flavor from her vigorous swirling of wine in the ridiculously small bowled glasses that hold the wines. Money and wine quickly change hands. The next few wineries were not on our planned itinerary but its good that they were included. First is Barossa Valley Estate for a light lunch and, well OK, perhaps just a taste or two. The wine that stands out here is their 1999 Sparking Shiraz. Outstanding! It is considerably better that the Seppelts wines and we immediately get a bottle to have with our meat and cheese lunch. Next is Gnadenfrei Estate. Here we taste the 2003 St Michael’s Shiraz. It’s a big blackberry jammy, tannic monster that’s 15.3% alcohol that will need quite a few years to soften. While you wait you could drink its little brother the 2003 Shiraz/Grenache mix which is not quite as big, but just as jammy. Next door Viking Vineyard is closed so we speed off to Heritage Estate where we are greeted at the cellar door by the cellar cat. Well its not so much a greeting as a roll of the head so that her chin can be scratched while she continues to sleep. Kaesler is next but it’s a quick visit as the air conditioners generate such cold blasts of air that its uncomfortable being in the tasting room let alone actually tasting wine. The last winery for the day is The Willows Vineyard where we want to taste The Bonesetter but its all sold out. However their Cabernet Sauvignon begins a discussion that lasts for days. The wine smells overwhelmingly of eucalyptus and it is explained to us that the grapes for the wine came from a vineyard surrounded on three sides by eucalyptus trees. Its not the minty character that many people find in young Cabernet wines but we look for it in every one we taste from that moment on. Wine will do that to you. Back in Tanunda we adjourn to the Tanunda Pub for dinner. Perhaps not unexpectedly no one wants any wine with dinner. Again not unexpectedly I go for the German sausages and when it comes with an unexpected pork chop it remains uneaten. Did I misread the menu, or did I really drink too much wine.

Sydney-Adelaide-Tanunda I don’t sleep well due to the street noise. The next morning Miranda tells me how well she slept because she used her ear plugs and why didn’t I use my plugs when she told me to do so! Still it’s a sunny day and so after breakfast in the hotel we take a walk around the local shops and admire a statue of Captain James Cook, finally get some money from an ATM and then take the Gemini shuttle bus on Toad’s Wild Ride to the Domestic Terminal. This time its a young guy doing the driving, possibly German, but certainly fantasizing that he’s on some Grand Prix circuit somewhere. The next leg of our trip is to Adelaide to meet up with my brother John and cousin Ngaire and her husband Chris. The first few days of this vacation are to be wine soaked and so we waste very little time in getting to the first winery, Penfolds Magill. This is a vineyard situated in suburban Adelaide that does tastings and winery tours and has a restaurant. We taste through the wines on offer but there is nothing that catches our attention. The others are more interested in food and so its off to find some. We decide to search out the restaurant where we will meet a bunch of other wine lovers for dinner that evening. Its not open for business but they do let us leave our wines there, rather than drag them around in a hot car for the rest of the day. Fortunately there is a little shop nearby that provides us with some sandwiches and coffee. We have a couple of hours to kill before the dinner so we head off to the shops at Hyde Park to idle away the time. Getting back to The Sauce for dinner is a bit of an adventure in itself and we get lost more than once. But fortunately we make it and spend several hours in great company eating fine food and drinking our way through almost 20 excellent wines. The details of the event can be found here and here. As the witching hour of 10pm approaches we have to say our goodbyes and head out to Tanunda. It is somewhat of a miracle that we eventually arrive as we seem to be lost for most of the way. John has organized two very quaint little cottages for us. He, Miranda and I will stay in the palatial Clara’s Cottage while Ni and Chris will stay in the smaller Elsie’s Cottage. Both have been well stocked with breakfast foods, very thoughtful in our case. The decanter of port is perhaps a little excessive. But I guess it goes with the candles, the frog that’s full of bath bubbles and the two person spa bath! Of course there is no phone line and so no access to the internet and so no possibility to post timely updates to any of my eBlogs. But what else is new with these real-time updates that are always late.

Honolulu Airport Hotel to Sydney The HAH is much a used and abused hotel, but provides a good nights rest, and a more than adequate breakfast looking out across their pool area. We take the HAH shuttle to the airport. At the airport we check-in with QANTAS only to find that there is no Australian visa for Miranda. There should be one, its done automatically by American Airlines. OneWorld alliance partners? Do these two airlines actually talk to each other? We are ticketed, and then told to wait while the visa is issued. Certainly good service, well we are going Business Class (the top on the pile as far as QANTAS in concerned for this leg of the trip). Its done in minutes, which seems like a good sign. The fight to Oz is in the nose of the plane in Row 3, on the right-hand side of the aircraft. Its about a 10 hour flight, over the International Date Line. Enough time for three movies, two meals and sampling of a few fairly ordinary wines. The steward notices Miranda’s John Lennon T-shirt and tells her he had him on the plane at one time. Probably not the phrasing he was looking for but it gives them a topic of conversation for the rest of the flight. We arrive into sunny Sydney at 7pm on December 10th to a downpour. One thing about being in Business Class you get off quickly and so we get to Immigration fast only to find that the visa Miranda was given in Hawaii has a problem and she has to accompany officials while I head off to collect the luggage. Another perk of flying Business is that your bags come off bloody fast as well. We could be out of here in record time! Miranda appears just as I load up the bags and we head to Customs where she declares several bags of spices and chilies. They get more than the once over, with comments of “You can buy these here in Australia”. In the end she gets to keep them. It would be nice to find an ATM that works and we try three but none can process our request for the mighty Aussie dollar “at this time”. Fortunately we have Euros left from our recent trip to Europe and they are quickly exchanged. Miranda has organized a room at the Gemini Hotel in Randwick, so we call for their shuttle and do as instructed and go to Bay 24 to wait for the white van to arrive. We don’t have long to wait before it pulls up and the original Aussie battler jumps out with a white bath towel thrown over his head and shoulders as protection from the rain. He hurries us to get our carry-on bags and ourselves into the van while he gets the bigger bags. One gets thrown onto the seat next to me, the other onto the front seat, and we are off. He seems to want to have a conversation, but with all the rattling and road noise and his soft voice its hard to make out exactly what he’s saying. And so after a while he turns on the radio. The Gemini looks like a very nice hotel with a very modern lobby. We head up to room 403. Miranda enters and stops almost immediately and I think that she has been stunned by the elegance of the room but no she just reached the limit of the room’s dimensions. Small is not quite the right description. In addition the room overlooks Belmore Road and its pretty regular traffic. Without any air-conditioning we have to keep the window open to get some air circulation, but I’m too tired to worry about it and fall onto the bed. At some point Miranda mumbles something about ear plugs and I tell her there are some in the bag of goodies I got from the QANTAS steward.

Down Under to The Barossa Valley On our way! We leave San Diego Commuter Terminal and the Poodles behind at 2:30pm, flying American Eagle to LAX. It is always fun to fly in a seemingly unsafe twin engine plane with a steward who runs through the safety instructions in a rapid nasal voice that no one understands. And then find that as you approach LAX a much larger plane is off to the right hand side and at the same altitude! Fortunately it stays the same distance away throughout our approach into LAX. And then we get more instructions that no one understands! Time for a snack at Chilli’s. The Buffalo Wings are HOT, and not wings anyway. The next flight is American Airlines to Honolulu at 6:30pm – 1st Class, no less! Flying time 5 hours and 42 minutes but with time change we arrive a little after 10pm, well rested after dinner and a movie (A Shark’s Tale). And a pretty damn good chardonnay that I never even got the name of. I have to learn to just grab the bottle, or at least ask! Ah, Honolulu and humidity! We share our shuttle bus to the Honolulu Airport Hotel (HAH) with an Australian girl returning home to Melbourne. She had just spent a few weeks in Denver helping a friend through the birth of her first baby. What else are Aussies for if not to be mates?