Sippin through Barossa Valley

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Rising early we set forth for our first official wine tour. Clover and I grew up working from time to time as wine pickers in Southern Oregon and figured it would be nice to pass through wine country viewing it from a different angle. Thus we set out to see what the entire hubbub around the Barossa Valley Shiraz was all about.

Barossa Valley starts a little over an hour from Adelaide and has come to be one of Australia's most internationally recognized wine regions. This is where you’ll find Jacob’s Creek, Wolf Blass, and even Cockatoo Ridge (widely known for its Yellow Tail label). At the current moment there is approximately a 100 wine cellars (wineries that have their own label) within the Barossa Valley. In the early days this region was first offered to wealthy Englishmen and then turned over for Europeans. As it would turn out a large group of German farmers ended up fleeing religious trouble in Prussia and became some of the first wine growers within the region.

The thing that struck me the most about the wine region of Barossa was that for the most part they don’t water their grapes except through rainfall. Considering how dry and dusty the area looked it struck me as quite the contrast when you compared it to the vineyards we’ve seen back home in California and southern Oregon. The grapes for the most part are smaller albeit they make some very tasty Shiraz (Syrah in Europe). Shiraz grapes account for 40% of Australia’s red grape crush and constitute one fifth of all wine grape production in Australia.

Along the tour we stopped by a little vineyard called Cockatoo Ridge. This vineyard decided to have a little fun with their wine by combining an amusing name with an iconic symbol of Australia. Thus Yellow Tail was born which has become an internationally known tasty table wine at a nice price. Too bad the ladies serving up the wine tasting forgot this fact; they seemed to be a bit stingy on the wine tasting samples.

For lunch we got another chance to eat some Kangaroo which is super yummy. It’s a cross between deer and beef with a very nice lean cut to it. Towards the end of the day we stopped over at a Dam that had an amusing story. Supposedly as the dam was being built one of the workers was told by his crew to go over and pick up some tools on the other side of the dam. As it so happens with acoustics if your below the curved part of a large structure sound can carry over a 140meters if you’re standing in the right spot. So as the worker got to the other side of the dam, he was fully able to hear a couple of his fellow workers talking about him in perfect clarity. I’ll take it that what they said wasn’t very good, since the worker picked up a shovel, walked back across the dam and then preceded to beat the living crap out of the fellow talking bad about him.  Just goes to show, if you don’t have nothing nice to say, make sure you’re not under a damn when you say it. Today you can stop by and have people carry on conversations in a normal talking voice while standing over 140 meters apart.

So sippin our way through the Barossa Valley was fun experience and indeed it’s much easier to be on the touring side of grapes rather than the picking.

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Photos

The Grapes of Barossa
Some grapes from Kies Vineyard

Rocking Horse
Clover discovers her rocking horse won't move!

Whispering Wall
It don't look fancy, but you can hear people talking from a 140m away.

Gum Tree
I never get tired of looking at the gum trees (Eucalyptus).

Barossa Valley
Good lookout spot in which stone carvings dot the hillside.

Not made in China
Kind of neat to see some handmade toys.

Roses along the vine rows.
Roses are planted in front of the vine rows because they are pretty, color helps tell the type of grape vine in the off season, and they are an early detection of bugs since the bugs love rose leaves.