Australian Wines February 27

Adelaide  February 27

We started the day at a very reasonable 9:00 which felt wonderful.  We are well-rested.  We drove to the Barossa Valley which is about an hour and a half northwest of Adelaide and is the source of many of Australia’s best wines as well as its less expensive but very drinkable wines (such as Yellowtail and Jacob’s Creek).  Our first visit was to the Yalumba Winery:

This beautiful winery has the only cooperage in Australia, and we had a tour of it:

They use oak from the USA and from France, and put out barrels of various sizes: Puncheon, Hogshead, Barrique, Quarter Cask, and Octave:

We had a tasting of five different wines and an extensive description of the winemaking.  We especially liked a white called Yolumba Viognier, which we will look for when we get home.  We had a tour of the winery and then a phenomenal lunch which was completely created from local meats, cheeses and breads.  Of course there was wine at lunch, and we sort of fell into a post-prandial torpor.  We roused ourselves to visit a smaller boutique winery named for the man who runs it and who spoke to us, Charles Melton.  He is, we were told, an internationally famous wine-maker and he was really fun and interesting to listen to.  He took us out into the vineyard which is bursting with grapes as it is now harvest time:

We then, of course, had a tasting of five of his wines, all of which are expensive to very expensive, and got on the bus for the ride back to Adelaide.

Up early tomorrow for a travel day—in the morning we fly four hours north to Darwin and then drive another three or four hours to Kakadu National Park, with lectures on the bus about Kakadu and the Aboriginal peoples.