Barossa Valley, South Australia
After Heron Island, we continued our "high life" adventure by flying to Adelaide and renting a car to drive to Barossa Valley for the weekend. Barossa is Oz's oldest wine region so we thought we might be doing a "Napa Valley" weekend.
I had fun driving up in a little Toyota Yaris (smaller than a mini - in fact, we don't have anything nearly as small in the states - imagine that!), with manual transmission and in the left lane! Fortunately we had 2 weeks in Oz to get used to being on the other side of the road. Driving up to Barossa, we took the A20 to B19 which was a nice country road into Barossa through Gawler and then Tanunda, where our B&B was located - Lawley Farm! Leslie met us and showed us our own cottage, which was as charming as we could have imagined it; amidst vineyards and with a lovely garden and friendly farm animal (ducklings :)) steps away. She recommended we just stick to Krondorf Road as there were so many famous wineries on our street.
Well, what a nice change of pace we had in Barossa! Barossa is still low-key and informal, even compared to Sonoma wineries. Our Saturday wineries included lunch at Barossa Vines and tastings at small boutique wineries - Charles Melton (wines were poured by Virginia, the friendly wife of Charles, the wine maker; it was a load of fun as we experienced the tasting while chatting with some Aussies), Rockford, St. Hallets, and Villa Tinto .
Villa Tinto turned out to be a wonderful surprise. Alberto is the owner, who originally hails from Mendoza Argentina (an instant connection for me (X)! He started the winery, making wines which IMHO are very similar to the food-friendly wines of Argentina, Spain and Italy; not so much for tasting & enjoying on their own, but with food, as it should be! I started speaking in spanish with Alberto, and then 2 Spaniards showed up, who were also directed to Villa Tinto by another winery. One thing led to another, and Alberto gave us some tastes out of his barrels and his lovely wife Diane even invited us to a delicious dinner of asado (Argentine BBQ right in his own backyard), spanish tortilla cooked by the Spaniards, and of course more Villa Tinto wine! We had a great time seeing the video of some TV coverage of the winery, spoke loads of Spanish and some German (!) and making some new friends in Australia.
Sunday I(X) woke up with a little hangover, but we still enjoyed our farm-fresh egg breakfast delivered to our room :). We visited Torbreck, Murray Street, Two Hands, and then back to Villa Tinto to buy our wines and ship everything to Sydney! We unfortunately found out Henschke was closed early; we had hoped to taste there on our drive back to Adelaide.
We stopped in North Adelaide to eat at Cibo, which had a delicious gnocchi. We stayed in the old part of Adelaide to be close to Wayward Bus Tours for our trip to the Great Ocean Road the next day.
I had fun driving up in a little Toyota Yaris (smaller than a mini - in fact, we don't have anything nearly as small in the states - imagine that!), with manual transmission and in the left lane! Fortunately we had 2 weeks in Oz to get used to being on the other side of the road. Driving up to Barossa, we took the A20 to B19 which was a nice country road into Barossa through Gawler and then Tanunda, where our B&B was located - Lawley Farm! Leslie met us and showed us our own cottage, which was as charming as we could have imagined it; amidst vineyards and with a lovely garden and friendly farm animal (ducklings :)) steps away. She recommended we just stick to Krondorf Road as there were so many famous wineries on our street.
Well, what a nice change of pace we had in Barossa! Barossa is still low-key and informal, even compared to Sonoma wineries. Our Saturday wineries included lunch at Barossa Vines and tastings at small boutique wineries - Charles Melton (wines were poured by Virginia, the friendly wife of Charles, the wine maker; it was a load of fun as we experienced the tasting while chatting with some Aussies), Rockford, St. Hallets, and Villa Tinto .
Villa Tinto turned out to be a wonderful surprise. Alberto is the owner, who originally hails from Mendoza Argentina (an instant connection for me (X)! He started the winery, making wines which IMHO are very similar to the food-friendly wines of Argentina, Spain and Italy; not so much for tasting & enjoying on their own, but with food, as it should be! I started speaking in spanish with Alberto, and then 2 Spaniards showed up, who were also directed to Villa Tinto by another winery. One thing led to another, and Alberto gave us some tastes out of his barrels and his lovely wife Diane even invited us to a delicious dinner of asado (Argentine BBQ right in his own backyard), spanish tortilla cooked by the Spaniards, and of course more Villa Tinto wine! We had a great time seeing the video of some TV coverage of the winery, spoke loads of Spanish and some German (!) and making some new friends in Australia.
Sunday I(X) woke up with a little hangover, but we still enjoyed our farm-fresh egg breakfast delivered to our room :). We visited Torbreck, Murray Street, Two Hands, and then back to Villa Tinto to buy our wines and ship everything to Sydney! We unfortunately found out Henschke was closed early; we had hoped to taste there on our drive back to Adelaide.
We stopped in North Adelaide to eat at Cibo, which had a delicious gnocchi. We stayed in the old part of Adelaide to be close to Wayward Bus Tours for our trip to the Great Ocean Road the next day.
Labels: Australia, Barossa, honeymoon, Julie, shiraz, wine tasting, Xavier
posted by Xavier at 12:58 AM
2 Comments:
Slacking on the updates! :) You must be having too much fun! I hope all is well. ~ RLaw
Sounds like a great trip so far. How about some pictures? hehe...
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