Today was Barossa winery touring day. We started out with a nice breakfast at our B&B followed by an hour or so of trying to get a hotel booking in Victor Harbor. Looks like this weekend is going to busy as we appear to have got one of the last rooms available.
We started out our winery tour at the nearby Rockford Wines. Their tasting room was in a beautiful vintage stone building. We had our first taste of not only the excellent Shiraz and Cab’s, but the staff working in the Cellar Doors (Tasting Rooms). They all seemed to have lots of time to chat and provide lots of travel tips.
Rockford wines still de-stem their grapes with a vintage machine driven by a belt from a line shaft. They also use traditional stave barrel crushing presses. A fabulous boutique winery.
Next up was Pindare Wines, a family owned operation where our sampling host was the owner. It was interesting that she know all about the LCBO and how difficult it was to get wines listed for sale in Ontario. She was working on getting one of their small batch wines into LCBO Vintages and was astounded by the red tape involved. She was able to provide us with lots of ideas of things to do in Adelaide for the next couple of days.
Our next stop was Seppeltsfield Wines, a larger operation with a restaurant. We sampled a couple of wines but had to leave as we could not stand the noise from the cavernous restaurant that was filled with a couple bus loads of women eating, drinking and talking. It must have been over 100 decibels in there.
All of the roads around Seppeltsfield are lined with palm trees!
On to a much smaller Two Hands Wines where we had our own personal host in this high end small volume wine maker. Absolutely excellent wines (should be at up to $1,980/case). Their cellar door is in a restored stone house that had a separate original kitchen/bakery.
At home, we have had Yulumba wines so we had to try out this higher volume producer. Again, very personal treatment in the cellar door. They didn’t even have the wine they export to the LCBO for tasting. They started with the $30/bottle Shiraz and went up from there. Too bad I was only able to taste and spit today.
Our final stop was at Bethany Wines, next door to our B&B. The young lady there was great at providing some more travel trips, especially some hiking opportunities for here and Adelaide. She told us where we may be able to find some koalas in the wild near Adelaide.
Other than the fabulous wines, and facilities, the nest best thing here is no tasting fees! Even for the super premium wines!
We returned to our place and had a late afternoon snack. Unfortunately, it had clouded over and the wind had picked up and the temperature had dropped to the point where it was a bit cool (20C) sitting outside to watch the parrots so we got caught up on some travel research before going out for supper.
We had a nice dinner at Vintner’s Bar and Grill in Angaston. It still looks like Cyclone Nathan will be revisiting Queensland on Friday. Glad we got out of there!
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