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!