Monday, November 24, 2008

Two Weeks Exploring Australian Wine – A brief overview

We have been back from Australia for a little over a week and it has taken me that long to recover from a head cold, thanks to a fellow passenger on our return flight. The only saving grace was that I didn’t succumb to the sniffles, sneezes and aching muscles while we were on our 3,000 kilometer odyssey through some of Australia’s best wine country. Miranda was not so fortunate; she came down with the dreaded “common” cold the day before we left Dubbo and we were almost through with McLaren Vale before she recovered enough to last though a full day of wine tasting.

Even with the unplanned visits to various Chemists (pharmacists), for the latest in cold remedies, the trip was a great opportunity to explore the diversity of Australian wine. We discovered excellent whites at Printhie near Orange, got a lesson on how to stylishly open a screw capped wine bottle from Ken Helm as we sampled his outstanding Canberra Rieslings, had dinner under a stamped metal ceiling in an historic guesthouse with a boisterous bunch of Aussies, and were the fist through the door at the 2008 Cork and Fork in Cowra. And that was just the first two days!

Two weeks, three states, six wine regions, and all by car. Red wine, white wine, dessert wine, fortified wine, sparkling wine, even wine that technically was not wine at all - we tried them all. Some were simply not that good, others superb. We had cellar door experiences that were not all that polite to hours and hours of joyously sampling Mollydooker wines with Sparky’s mum. We explored Joseph’s room and found a barrel of wine to celebrate our own centenary. We had a winemaker tell us that the wine we gifted him was not that good, only to apologize the next day. It didn’t matter. He was correct and anyway he was allowed to roast Washington Syrah because he had shared his food, his wines and his back verandah late into the night. We had so much wine at one dinner that the waitstaff were forced to bring a separate table to hold all the bottles, and some of the half open bottles had to be given away to other diners. We rode on a paddle steamer, had dinner on a slag heap and ran over a wild pig. We left no stone unturned.