Super Wines Monday 2/04/08

No, not Super Bowl. After watching 41 Super Bowls in a row and having one chance to visit the premium wine growing region in Australia, we decided we could miss the big game. It started at 10:00 AM local time so we had to settle for Howie, Terry and the boys who were on here at 5:00 AM. Of course it would turn out to be a great game and huge upset, but we got plenty of news and reruns.

We grabbed a bite of breakfast in the restaurant here where we had our introduction to "Vegemite" (which is a yeast spread that tastes like a cross between molasses and cat litter) and then walked a block to our tour pick-up point at about 8:30. The guide was a pleasant and knowledgeable fellow and our fellow tourers included a Seattle young man who is on a 13 month tour of the world and three folks from outside Sydney, a thirtiesh fellow, his wife and his best mate. He sat on the bus with his best mate.

The South Australia wine country starts south of Adelaide just inland from the coast and stretches north through the hills east of town and into the northern Barossa Valley. We headed south to McLaren Vale which is the home to big names Rosemount and Hardys, and 46 smaller operations. After about a 45 minute drive it was time for tea at a small cheese shop in the village of McLaren Vale named Blessed Cheese, which was really coffee, cheese, crackers and fruit all around. At our first winery (Fox Creek) we were given the informational tour of the facility and shown the process from planting to bottling. We then tasted some award winning reds and whites while discussing the delicate undertones of pineapple and herbs and the finish reminiscent of chocolate and tobacco. These converstaions would deteriorate as the day went on.

The second stop, The Olive Grove, was primarlity an olive business with a few wines thrown in for good measure and an alpaca business just in case they fell on hard times. The olives were very tempting but required refrigeration after opening so we just nibbled samples with our wine.
Woodstock was our next winery and lunch stop. Our tasting person had worked wineries in Oregon and had heard of Minnesota so we are making progress. The lunch is a collection of meats, cheeses, fruit, pate and tortilla like chunks that all work pretty well for swilling even more wine. Our Sydney couple is buying a couple of cases at each stop and the best mate, who is wearing a Detroit Redwings t-shirt, has moved along to beer with lunch. We asked him if he had seen the movie "Sideways" but he hadn't. Everyone is a little sleepy for our next stop (Hugo Winery), but our hostess pulls out a couple good Shiraz options including a $50/bottle number that you normally don't see in these tastings. She is off to the Greek Islands in a couple weeks so she has a lengthy conversation with our Seattle world traveler who clues her in to the hot party spots on Mykenos.

It is now a 35 minute drive into the Adelaide hills and our guide Marc, who has explained that he spends his weekends in road rallys, keeps everyone on the edge of their seats as we cover most of the distance on two wheels. That gets the adrenaline flowing and we are more fired up as we pull into a converted mill to sample Petaluma wines. They have three in the Aussie top 100 and we get a taste of all of them as well as a few lesser lights. They also have a highly regarded lunch-only restaurant. When we asked our hostess if she had a busy day, she explained that the tasting room was not very busy but they were always stressed with the load from the restaurant We checked it out and it has 40 seats and is open from 12-2:30 on Thursday through Sunday, which seem to equal 10 hours per week. She seems to have a different point of view of stress than we had when in the business.

We arrive at our last stop (Arranmore Wines) at about 4:30 and while we are all winding down, this is our favorite. It is a one-man operation with one old guy (our age) who decided to buy a few acres to plant pinot and chardonnay, and make French style wines. He has a couple dogs running around, is a Garrison Keillor fan and makes terrific wines in very small quantities. He sells them to a couple of restaurants, a little wine store in his local town and in a wine co-op store. Oh yeah, he made some Shiraz when he was given some Barossa Valley grapes a couple years ago and it is now selling for $150 a bottle at a couple of Sydney restaurants. The wines are really unique and he is a great story teller, so we don't get out of there (carrying a few bottles with us) until almost 5:30. We get the road rally ride back down out of the hills and into Adelaide at 6:15, exactly an hour behind schedule.

We have a 7:30 dinner reservation so we take a couple minutes to check on the football details and put our feet up. The restaurant (Amalfi) is a couple blocks down from our hotel and is hopping for a Monday night. Our table is against the wall and everything in the place and outside on the sidewalk is full except a couple tables next to us. We, of course, get a bottle of wine and John has a barramundi (local freshwater fish not unlike a walleye) in a lemon caper sauce with a salad and roasted potatoes, and Mary has the Puttanesca. As we were winding down, the tables next to us were shoved together and young folks wearing black and white shirts with some initials began to file in, and they kept coming and coming. Finally a couple older types squeezed in and we volunteered to move to a vacant table to let them have ours. Turns out that one of the older guys was the newest local member of Parliament who was hosting a dinner for a big group of his volunteers. He didn't seem to think the contribution of our table to his campaign was worth buying our dinner.

It was a leisurely walk back to the hotel with no more uncomfortable feelings with our surroundings and the sleep of baby angels.

Today's local headline: PM Calls on best and brightest The Australian (Prime Minister calls nationwide visioning summit)

New Adventures Sunday 2.3.08

This is eerie. We rise and shine, do a few chores, explore around town a bit visiting the retail area and town gathering place where there are entertainers and a market going on, grab a bite of lunch with a cold beer, we walk through the park that separates one side of the central city from the other where we check out the botanical gardens and playing fields and hit the arts district where there is an afternoon art fair in full swing. We head back to the hotel for a bit of a rest before heading out for some Asian food. Wait a minute, this is an exact repeat of yesterday, and yesterday was GROUND HOG DAY!!!

Okay, there are a couple differences. The chores we had this morning included getting up at 3:00 AM to be at the airport at 5:00 to catch our 6:25 flight to Melbourne, continuing on to Adelaide. Once again everything was as smooth as it could be. We caught an earlier than scheduled flight from Melbourne and reached our hotel in Adelaide before noon local time. Adelaide is 2-1/2 hours (how do you do that?) behind Christchurch so we have been up for almost 12 hours after a couple hours sleep and our desk guy gets us right into our room.
The eerie part is that the fellow who laid out Adelaide also laid out Christchurch and the central part of the cities are very, very similar. Christchurch has a population of about 400,000 while Adelaide is 1.2 million so there is more sprawl here, but we almost didn’t need a map to get around in the central business district where our hotel is located. Additionally, Adelaide is the capital of the state of South Australia while Christchurch is the principle city of Canterbury but the similarities probably end there. ChCh, as we mentioned, is the most English and genteel of NZ cities while Adelaide is a shipbuilding port on the ocean side and a mining, agricultural center on the inland side so it has a much more rough and tumble image. We got a feel for that on the plane from Melbourne when we noticed that most of the fellas were wearing their wife-beater shirts, although not the pilot. If Adelaide has any English to it, it would be Newcastle.

Our hotel is on Rundle Mall, the pedestrian only shopping and entertainment street. There are tons of folks milling about when we go out for lunch in spite of the 90+ degree heat. They have had a dry and painfully hot summer and it shows in the brown landscape. It is overcast, hot, humid and still which is not a way for a city to make a good impression on its new visitors, but the beer is really cold and our veggie pizza is first rate. We did the park and art fair thing only to keep from sleeping all day but we were both happy to get back to the room late afternoon for some air conditioning and a nap.

When we checked in the desk guy told us that the Chinatown we had heard so much about was actually a China-lane, but he assured us that there were a couple worthwhile restaurants there and we should give it a visit. When we went back out at about 6:30 all of the shoppers were gone leaving a few semi-rowdy teenage groups milling about so it was a bit uncomfortable. We did find China "lane" but nothing jumped out at us so we went back to the "Grange" restaurant which was on our list and in the same neighborhood. The table next to us was a group of young Chinese folks so we thought we had made the right call. We both had the fresh snapper special on slivered pea pods, wilted lettuce, and a little champagne sauce. It was perfect but we both thought we could have used a bit of starch on the plate and we were missing our Kiwi chefs already. We need more food.

The walk back to the hotel was better. There were more people around so we had obviously just hit a dead time slot when we left earlier. We manage to stay awake until 9:00 before crashing.

Today's Local Headline: Locked Up in Vegas Adelaide Sunday Mail (It is discovered that a local footballer had been arrested 3 years ago)