Everything in its Right Place

We found it somewhere near my little finger

We arrived in Apollo Bay on Wednesday after stopping a night in Port Fairy. One of the main reasons for stopping here was to revisit the spot at Marengo where I proposed to Jenny. As most of you know this is what the ring design is based on. We went down to what we were pretty sure was the spot and compared our rings and took some photos. We stayed two nights there and had a very relaxing time. Today we've taken off down the great ocean road to go to Leo (the mc at our reception) and Erin's house. We stopped at various scenic spots along the way. One was a spot where there are a lot of koalas, so we got out of the car and took some photos.

A little further down the road we came across a little beach where we decided have lunch. We got the esky out, some wine glasses, towels picnic rug etc. and we were about to make our way down to the beach when Jenny, very sensibly asked "Should we take our wedding rings off?" as we'd heard stories of wedding rings being lost in the surf before.

It was at this point, I remembered taking my ring off to put sunscreen on. Rather than put it somewhere safe I just put it in my lap with the expectation that I would be putting it straight back on after I'd finished with the sunscreen. Ironically, this was a strategy devised to avoid the ring slipping of after being greased up with sunscreen. So obviously I forgot it was there and when I got out of the car to look at the koalas it fell off my lap just outside the car. I only noticed it missing when Jenny suggested we look after them.

We had a quick rummage through the car and until I retraced my thoughts back to the Koala spot. It was only a short distance back up the road but it seemed to take forever to get there. We raced over to the spot where we had been parked. I quick scan of the area didn't reveal much. I was starting fear that it could bounced into some longer grass, or been buried deeper in the gravel by another car that parked there after us. To my complete and utter relief - a relief like I have never known - I saw it in the gravel and in one motion, snapped it up and put it back on its finger.

Upon reflection I can see some element of poetry in the fact that if I hadn't found it, the great ocean road is an appropriate place lose a ring that is essentially a map of the coast line that it runs along. But fortunately I don't have resort to such lame measures.

Hooray for Cabernets!

So I've gotten over my chardonnay-rage. On Monday we did what will presumably be our last wine tastings of the tour, and typically we left the best til last. We were staying in a cottage that was surrounded by five wineries within walking distance. And for the record, at this cottage, the owner brought around freshly baked bread and freshly laid chicken eggs every morning, which was lovely. But, given the proximity of those wineries, we figured that the best strategy would be to do two driving-distance ones in the morning and then two walking-distance ones in the afternoon. This is rather than doing five or so walking-distance wineries in one day and subsequently not being able to walk to the last couple anyway.

So, on Monday we drove to Punter's Corner and Rymill and were suitably impressed. We then got some cheese and other local produce from The Poplars (and also did another sneaky tasting there), and went back to the cottage for lunch. We then went Brand's Laira which was probably the best winery of the tour. We jagged it here because they had three of their 'special' wines on tasting - the Eric's Blend, the Captain Stentiford's Old Vine Shiraz and The Patron cabernet sauvignon. At $74 these were obviously, hopefully, going to be the real deal. And the thing was, their normally priced wines were great... even after three full tastings and a glass with lunch. But the lovely cellar door lass was another fan of the honeymoon concept and gave us the remains of the tasting bottle of the Stentiford's shiraz! Sounds gross, I know, but this is a $74 bottle of wine we're talkin about and was the unanimous favourite so far.

Next, we went to Zema which was also brilliant. At the first Coonawarra winery we to, Balnaves, I remember smelling mint on some of the cab savs and thinking "what the hell is wrong with my nose?!" But after doing 11 or so wineries that specialise in this particular variety, it became obvious that I was, in fact, on the right track. There was lots of different kinds of mint smells going on in the coonawarra cabernets. Some were quite sweet and  spearminty, others a bit more chemically and pepperminty and in some the alcohol pushed it into menthol territory. The mint was quite prominent at Zema but it was a real sweet spearmint kind and it had a delicious dark chocolate smell that complimented it perfectly. Take nothing away from the flavour but I could have bought case of it just to smell!

Harden the Chardonnay Up!

Just got back from Wynn's and DiGiorgio, our arvo tasting stops. We've learnt a good few things about wine this trip I say. I can now say we know our way around a Coonawarra Cabernet Sauvignon, we've now got a really good sense of the differences between shiraz from the hunter, rutherglen and here. I also had something confirmed that I already knew which is the fact that I like heavily oaked chardonnay. Apparently this is not so fashionable. A guy that was at a DiGiorgio while we were reckoned that the chardonnay I bought was not as good as the other one on offer because apparently "it had stronger fruit characters which handled the oak a lot better"... whatever.

Unwooded chardonnays are for pussies. Without oak they're nothin, just boring. Perhaps to more conservative, less adventurous palates no wood, or worse - more politely wooded chardonnays might be nice but what do you learn politeness? Niceness doesn't warrant comment or make you think. Nobody talks about the "pleasant" bank teller, or the "nice" landscape. It's the aggressive waiter or the offensive photograph that we remember and talk about later. I like my chardonnay the same way hate my hospitality staff: big; a little fruity; and likely to whack you in the mouth with big stick! Grow up chardonnay drinkers, get some wood!

The Water Recedes and the Wine Flows!

I tell ya, I recommend this whole getting-married-and-having-a-honeymoon thing. We've so far been to Majella and Katnook wineries today. Both cellar door ladies have been lovely, the Katnook lady gave us a free bottle of wine, again simply because it was our honeymoon. I love how people love love!

Coonawarras Are Go!

We arrived in Coonawarra yesterday after encountering a couple of minorly flooded roads. Coonawarra is a very neatly arranged wine region... literally a single road lined with superstar names of wine. It's kind of like walking into an exclusive Hollywood nightclub full of famous bunches of grapes.... hmmm. We did Balnaves and Patrick T yesterday afternoon and we figure we can probably fit in about 8 - 10 more over the next 2 days. We're heading off now for our full day of Coonawarraing. The challenge will be to see if I can coherently post updates through the day!

Echuca how it's supposed to be

We had lunch at Echuca about 3 days ago on the muddy banks of the Murray. The spot where I took this from is probably underwater like most of the town will be later today. I don't know what the fate of the paddle steamers will be...

The Other Floods

The first of a few water-covered roads we encountered on our quest to reach Coonawarra
 

Since leaving Rutherglen mobile reception has been patchy. We decided to drive via another wine region known as the Pyrenees. In fact, I reckon it would take a large amount of navigational skill to actually miss a wine region driving through Victoria. We stayed at a little winery called Summerfield which had the winning combination of excellent wine and accommodation. We arrived quite late as a result of a series of blocked roads due to the first lot of heavy rain that has since caused some major floods around central and western Victoria and have been jostling for news headline attention with Queensland.

  

We had a nice night at Summerfield, it's in a small town called Moonambel which doesn't offer much else in the way of tourist activities except the pub of course. We had a taste of some wines as we checked out, again shiraz was the grape of the moment. And it was probably the shiraz of the trip so far but that's actually a claim that's hard to back up because they're all so different region to region. But still this had flavours in all the right places of my mouth and it had the smoothness of a much older wine, I guess it's what people mean when they say a wine is 'well rounded' maybe... anyway it was delicious so we bought some.

However, as Mark, the winemaker, had warned us there was more water on the road from rain over night and so we had to choose our next destination carefully. Our choices were to either go directly to Coonawarra which woud mean a 4+ hour drive, or stop at the Grampians and take it easy for the afternoon. Mount Langhi has a their 'The Gap' winery near Hall's Gap afterall. So Hall's Gap it was: population 300; gateway to the Grampians; popular holiday destination for Melbournians; and, only since we arrived, the other place that's flooding.

Not the best photograph and it's not quite an inland tsunami but this creek was raging and even browsed a few shops in Hall's Gap.

We arrived at the local servo to see a group of sandbagging locals 'banding together' just like the news says they do. Stoney Creek runs through the town centre and had started rise up and threaten the shops. They ended up copping about 3 inches of water. We stayed at the Grampian Views holiday park and went down to the pub later that evening. It was truly hilarious to watch the locals watch themselves on the local news 'banding together' and make remarks about different people who were both on screen and in the pub. "The sandbags add ten pounds!" apparently.

So the next morning we started out on our way to Coonawarra  only to be greeted by yet more water on the road. And this was the case in all directions in fact. So we're currently stuck in Hall's Gap but it's a lovely day. We've had a couple of jugs of beer and games of pool at the pub and we've returned to our accommodation from last night and we currently have the place to ourselves because nobody can get in or out, which is odd because we heard on the radio that Hall's Gap had been evacuated - we would have liked to have been evacuated ourselves but nobody asked, and I don't know where these evacuees would have gone anyway? We've been told we can't drink the town water but we're stocked up with wine and we have enough food til tomorrow (and longer if we need it) when hopefully the brooks go back to their picturesque babbling selves.

Sydney has a great harbour but Rutherglen has a great port....

boom boom.

This title is taken from a sign on the edge of Rutherglen: a small town with big wines. The sign refers to the fact that the Rutherglen region is famous for Ports and Muscats and Tokays. Not that we're allowed to call them any of these names: Portugal says we're not allowed to call port brewed outside of Portugal, Port, so it's given names like VP which is just an acronym for Vintage Port and so only half pleases the Portuguese I'd assume, but otherwise it will just be called Tawny or whatever. I can't remember, since I learnt that this morning and I've since taste about a million wines since then. But it's the same as not being able to call champagne champagne or parmesan cheese parmesan cheese or even sherry sherry if it's not made in the place that it is named after [I'm not sure about the sherry on that count but they call it 'apera' these days]. So I get the impression that it's just a major inconvenience for people who name wine, so I'm pretty sure that Portugal won't get any help from their current financial woes from the global wine industry!

But regardless, they were thoroughly nice to us, here in Rutherglen. We did four wineries today: Pfeiffer, Anderson, Campbells and Warrabilla. And while Jenny did use the accurate adjective of "frog pond" for one of the wines from one of the wineries they all had amazing stuff to offer. At Pfeiffer we had a great conversation with the cellar door person and it was in a great building. We arrived at Pfeiffer at 9am which, even though that is their advertised opening time, we were apparently the earliest tasters they'd ever had - a title I'm comfortable with. The reason we got there so early is because we had a tour booked that left our motel at 11 so we didn't want to waste any time.

The tour was a with a guy named Alister who owns a B & B and drives a limo around the wineries. It was good to ride in a limo since we got a maxi taxi from the wedding reception to our hotel on Friday. We shared the tour with Geoff and Sherrie from Albury who were lovely and bought us a bottle of chardonnay from Campbells to drink in the limo because we are honeymooners! Tops cats, they were.

Anderson's had some great fortified wines (or "forties" as the locals call 'em) as do all the wineries around here but it's shiraz, cabernet and chardonnay (and reisling I've discovered) that I'm interested in so that governed our choice of wineries. I did taste the forties but I enjoyed the shiraz mostly. Anderson's were really dark berry-heavy and so different to anything I've had before but delicious nonetheless. Campbells had brilliant chardonnays both light and heavy oak - surprisingly, I liked both, not just the woody one. Warrabilla put us in our place, though: massively flavoured and massively alcoholic (like 18% alcholic!) reds but massively amazing as well. Shiraz and Durif were the big boys flexing their muscles in our mouths, but I really have never tasted anything similar. So I hope there are some more of these revalations further down the track. I think we're off to Bendigo tomorrow not sure if we'll get any wine in but we'll certainly try!

Floods of Wine

We stayed in Canberra after leaving Newcs at about 4pm Sunday but managed to get in to the Diplomat [hotel] and also into Portia's [Chinese Restaurant]. We left early Monday for Rutherglen but managed to fit in a quick wine tasting at Clonakilla winery, which was amazing. A small but thoroughly excellent winery, they had already sold out of their Shiraz Viogner which got 97 points in the '11 James Halliday book. But we still got to taste many wonderful wines including the fantastic Hilltops Shiraz (95 Hallidays) and the O'Riada Shriaz (96 Hallidays) needless to say we bought a few bottles with the generous bounty that our friends and family had given us for saying that we love each other in front of everybody. But the lovely thing was that Tim Kirk, chief winemaker (and CEO I think), gave us a complimentary bottle simply because it was our honeymoon! So I say go there if you can. We used that one for dinner that evening in Rutherglen which you can... see above. Meanwhile our home state of Queensland is flooding like we've been drinking... we're thinking of our friends there.

Bloggymoon

Hello all,
We had an amazing party for our wedding and we are eternally grateful to everybody who turned up and boogied down with us. We have now embarked on what is traditionally called a 'honeymoon' which, according to wikipedia (which I never read), refers to the month after the wedding day whilst the relationship between the couple is at its best. Apparently it also involves something about mead which, according to wikipedia (which I never read), is a kind of honey wine.The moon part is meant to refer to the waxing and waning nature of the moon which reflects the suposed waning of love after the first month of marriage. The honey part isn't so clear; it seems only to refer to the a 'honey-like moon', which, I guess, is an even more droopy moon than a waning one! Anyway - all tradtional negativity pushed aside as mythology and superstition - I choose to take the interpetation that relates to honey-wine... or at least wine. So far we've made the most of the route south by stopping at convenient wine regions along the way. However, apparently we'll be going to a place in Coonawarra that makes mead, so we may live more up to at least one of the traditions than we might have expected. Stay tuned...