The Hunter Monday 3/3/08

Another spectacular morning when we wake up in our little cottage. We take a quick walk around looking for our neighbor kangaroos but they are not cooperative. The cottage is stocked with the usual breakfast stuff which John whips into a scramble along with some fruit we picked up at Woolies last night. It’s about a 5 minute walk down to the reception area where our tour bus is picking us up at 9:45, give or take.

There are 14 people on the tour, 6 Americans, 6 Brits and a couple from Brisbane with tour guide Neville (same name as our tour guide at the Sydney Opera). The Americans are a young couple from Hawaii, an old couple from Oregon, and an old couple from Minnesota. One of the Brit couples from Nottingham is middle aged and is on an around the world honeymoon after having just been married in New York. Good on 'em, as we say here. We do five wineries on the tour, stop at a brew pub for lunch and finish at "The Stinky Cheese Shop." These things are always informational in a buzzed sort of way and we get to try some things we have not had before (verdelho?). There are 150 wineries in the valley including some of the big boys like Lindemans and Rosemount but we stick to the little locals. At one place we were reading a wine description which said "drink while young and zesty." Mary leaned over and said, "too late for us." Each of the wine hosts were sure to tell us that their wines were made differently than everyone else's, and their's were the best because of it.

Some highlights of the tour include: Seeing Kangaroos out and about in a lot of the fields in the morning; watching a gang tear down the stage from the Santana concert on Sunday night (last week was Rod Stewart) at one of the big wineries; meeting Lucy the collie at Lucy's Run Winery and talking to owner John about the Rod Stewart concert; Roz, one of our hosts telling us how to best enjoy her fine red wine with rare Kangaroo meat in her best Aussie accent, "yeah, go out and knock off a skippy, toss him on the barby, and snap the cap on a Sha-razz;" an informative discussion about different olive pressing techniques; chatting with our other tour members about their travels; and not driving while having a few. It takes two hands to carry our purchases back to our cottage so we will have to be on the lookout for more BYO restaurants during the rest of our trip.

It's about 5:30 when we settle in and we have a bit of a snack on our porch while looking for "skippies." Again, they are avoiding us but we still have hopes. We have some nice Tasmanian salmon fillets that we picked up last night and we coat them with a "dukkah" that we bought at one of the wineries. It is alledgedly Egyptian in origin and is a mixture of ground nuts and spices and would seem to make a nice crust for the fish. When the fish is half cooked we run out of gas on the grill and have to move it to a saute pan indoors, but we're food service professionals and we know there are a lot of ways to make this work. The fish is eventually very good and we have some supermarket deli greek salad to go with it...and another bottle of "sha-razz."

It's another crystal clear night and the boldness of the milky way reminds us of late summer nights on the dock at Lake Ada. We have no problem sleeping.

Today's local headline: Migrant Home Builders to ease shortage Sydney Morning Herald (Federal government will allow the immigration of 1500 construction workers to ease affordable housing crunch)