South Australian Wine!

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We have spent 5 nights in the ‘fare city’ of Adelaide and have really enjoyed our time here. Adelaide has the feel of a small town much like Cheltenham, although the population is 1.3 million!! There are lots of bars and restaurants and a good but small shopping precinct. Adelaide is the home of a great Belgian Beer Café, where we spent a nice afternoon drinking 8.9% Leffe Rossa (which kind of blew the dinner budget that day). This has been our first experience of backpacker hostel accommodation. The YHA is very comfortable much like a Travel Lodge although it is very noisy at night and has reminded us both of University accommodation. We need to get used to it though, as we will be staying in the YHA along the Great Ocean Road on our trip back to Melbourne.

The main reason to visit South Australia is the wine. Over 80% of the wine exported from Australia comes from the Adelaide region. We initially booked the McLaren Vale and Adelaide Hills tour, a small bus tour incorporating 5 wineries specialising in red wine, mostly Shiraz. We had a great day sampling the different wines and as you can imagine, were a little worse for wear on our return to the hostel! As Adelaide is a small city, we were unsure as to how to occupy our final day. The day drinking in the McLaren Vale helped us decide that we really should see the Barossa Valley, so that evening we booked on the Barossa tour for the next morning!!

The Barossa trip was also great and we had the opportunity to sample wine from more well known wineries such as Wolf Blass. As we are driving back to Melbourne, we have taken the opportunity to purchase several bottles of the local wine to take back home in the boot of the hire car! We have met some nice people on the trips who we will be dining with this evening. We have even been offered some accommodation and harbour boat cruise in Sydney!

During our time here we have visited a local art gallery, museum and chocolate factory, as well as walking through the beautiful Botanical Gardens. The day before yesterday we visited the beach suburb of Glenelg. This is somewhere that you are supposed to visit for the sunsets. However, it was a cloudy day so we grabbed a bottle of wine and some fish and chips instead! It feels much smaller than Melbourne and I think that 5 days has been plenty, although we have had a great time.

Tomorrow we hire a car and head off on our trip home to Melbourne. We will be driving along the famous Great Ocean Road over a 5 day period and are looking forward to seeing some seaside scenery! Until next time……..

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