..... Drinking our way through South Australia

Hic.  Oh boy.  We arrived to the Barossa Valley and started wine tasting at 10am with a visit to Jacob's Creek.  Yes, there is a Jacob's Creek.  And they do make a rather fine Shiraz.

Let's go back a bit when we kicked off our wine tour up in Milawa, Victoria with a visit to Brown Brothers' cellar door at 9:30 last Sunday morning.  A sip of wine in the morning is actually not a bad thing even if you aren't in Church.  I don't know why we don't do it more often.  

But now we are in the Barossa region.  Home to the likes of Wolf Blass, Jacob's Creek and Peter Lehman amongst many others.  We stopped at the ones we knew as well as a couple of smaller ones and made off with some goodies to drink on our journey.  We sampled a sparkling Shiraz (quite nice) at Jacobs Creek and a lovely Grenache at Turkey Flat.  

We spent about $180.00 on 5 bottles of wine... for that money we could have bought 30-40 bottles of clean skins.  The power of branding!  

The wine tasting is done a little differently in Australia.  There seems to be no limit to the number of wines you can sample nor the price range, and they don't charge you a penny.  We sampled a $180 bottle of Meschach at Grant Burge vineyards after making our way down their tasting list.    You feel somewhat obliged to buy a bottle and perhaps a wee bit tipsy after all that sampling.  At least we do, and that's how we ended up with so much wine.

Our next stop was McLaren Vale where we had to visit Shingleback's Cellar Door.  These guys are the producers of Red Knot which was the wine we served at our wedding.  We felt it was an appropriately named wine for our 'red and white' wedding.  We discovered that Red Knot is their basic level wine and sells for $12.00 a bottle here (not much less than what we paid for it at the LCBO).  We sampled the mid-level Shiraz under their flagship brand Shingleback and of course we had to buy a bottle of that.  Even though Rosemount is just around the corner, we didn't stop at any other vineyards in McLaren Vale - KiaRoo is starting to look like a bottle shop and we still had one more valley to visit.  

This is Shingleback's vineyard - they also produce a cold-pressed olive oil.  

The Clare Valley is one of the prettiest we have seen.  We visited the Jesuits vineyard, Sevenhills, sampled some wine and I don't need to tell you the rest of the story. 

Sevenhills has been producing wine since the 1851 when it was founded by the Austrian Jesuit priests.  You can buy a bottle of Altar wine in their shop in case you didn't get enough of it at Mass on Sunday.