Monday, June 16, 2003

 
Sunday was a day for a very special and educational tour: Visiting the vineyards and wineries of the Hunter Valley. Short Summary: Awesome and highly recommended!


We booked the tour with Visitours in advance and at 7:45 AM we were picked up by Steven, our driver for the day and a nice comfy 10 seater Mercedes Van. Since we were the first we could pick ideal seats and enjoyed a small tour through downtown Sydney picking up the other people. But soon we were on our way up the Pacific Highway listening to Steven's very entertaining lecture on Australian History, Wines and whatnot. We had a quick stop at a typical OZ road place (of course occupied by McDonalds and Boston Market) ... and around 10:30 we reached our first winery: Iron-Gate





Located in a beautiful hacienda-style building, we all grouped along a fancy marble bar and Roger, the owner, gave us 7 wines to taste, of which we both enjoyed a 2002 Chardonnay the best (and bought a bottle) but also their 2002 Shiraz was very nice. We also got a tour of the wine making fascility.

And off to watering whole #2: Audrey Wilkinson. (Audrey was actually a guy, and to make it even more weird, he never drank wine ... he just tasted it and spit it out :). Here we sampled another 6 or so wines, and left with a bottle of their 2000 Shiraz ... but that time we noticed already that Shiraz in Reds and Chardonnays (aged in Oak barrels, unlike some new ones which are unwooded) in whites were our favorites.




3rd stop was lunch at a place called Oscar's Cafe, which was part of a somewhat touristy looking 'village' which had several eateries and souvenir shops. We settled for a really tasty salmon/caper/red onion/avocado sandwich.

Next winery was a bit different, as Steven pointed out, the McDonald under the wineries (in the way they do the tastings): McGuigan's. They are obviously prepared for bigger groups and it was a bit impersonal, but fun was that the first Chardonnay we tried was a bottle I bought 2 weeks ago in Fiji. So, we skipped the cheap exports and went for more serious stuff. Most was nice, but nothing interested us enough to buy it (I just found a bottle-shop ad in the paper, offering the McGuigan's Black Label Chardonnay for 5.95 AU$ per bottle if you buy a dozen, at the winery it would have been around 20AU$). But the adjacent cheese factory saw some of our money: While the free tasting was equally 'conveyor belt' mentality, and the young lady helping us was in bitch mode, the cheeses were great and we got 3 of them for a forthcoming cheese and wine evening we will have here. There was also a Fudge Factory, but time was running out.







We had one more place to go: Capercaillie. While not having the fanciest building, inside they had in addition to wines also lots of arts and pottery and crafts. But we sampled their wines anyway. All 4 whites we tried were very very nice (even the Traminer, which usually is too sweet for me). We only bought the Chardonnay though. Their Shiraz was ok, and they have a nice white port, which again was sweet, but lighter than red ports. This having been the last vinery, we started our return trip. Everyone was pretty tired and exhausted from drinking wine all day, Steven put in "Austin Powers 2" for us to watch, and so we made our way back to the city ... the setting sun painted everything golden, and half the bus was dozing off while the other half was watching.

Even with the sunday evening return traffic getting stronger, we got back just fine and by 6:30 PM we were in our hotel room again. I can highly recommend this tour, Steven has been a fantastic tour guide and save driver. I like the concept of a smaller group (we had seen several busses that would seat 60+ people) so we can move quicker from place to place and it also feels more family style ... the group around us were all young people and were all great travel buddies.

When Steven dropped us off, he also had some good dinner suggestions, so after a little break we walked down Oxford Street (a pretty interesting albeit scuzzy looking area) and found many nice places, ending up at "Saigon Bay", a vietnamese place, where he had spring rolls, Bun Xaoh (a spicy noodle dish) and spicy/sour beef thing (with onion, pineapple and bellpeppers, in a tamarind/chili sauce.
posted by Peter 8:35 AM