Wine Tasting in Barossa Valley
If you head 60km north east from Adelaide you’ll reach Barossa Valley. The Barossa region is a part of South Australia which is particularly well known for its wineries and vineyards. When a place has a reputation for making wine, you can’t help but feel obliged to at least give it a try. There are a lot of wineries in the area which are open for wine tasting, as well as events such as the Barossa Vintage Festival. Now, I’m no wine connoisseur, but..
.. I like to pretend that I am!
Straight up, I enjoy a good merlot, but I’m really picky and I’m not much of a fan of other wines. That meant that a lot of the wines I tasted, I actually thought were… less savoury. I can’t help it, guess I’m just not sophisticated enough for that kind of thing, right? Anyhow.
The winery that I ended up visiting was a pretty cool place. I mean, vineyards aside (they’re huge, and they’re everywhere) there were some older buildings that just seemed to fit. Excuse the glare, I’d been using my camera for a grand total of like.. 3 days? and we were in a little bit of a hurry!
I think it gives you the right kind of impression though, enough to understand a little bit of what the place was like. From the outside, most of the buildings on the estate were similar. The architecture I guess has something to do with the English colonisation that took place here a couple hundred years ago. Here’s a different, less sunny angle.
I believe I’ve also used this next picture before, but if you’ve never been, or you don’t know what a vineyard looks like, it’s a lot like this. Or rather, exactly like this. Just keep in mind (as you might’ve guessed from the two images above) that it was almost the middle of winter when I visited, hence the not completely apparent lack of greenery, and the yellowing and fallen leaves.
Before we indulged in the tasting of wine, there was a pretty cool opportunity to have a look about the place. Down in the cellars, out the back kind of thing. Wineries, breweries and those kinds of places aren’t the sorts of places I often frequent, so it made a good opportunity for me to have a mooch. And the rest of us, obviously. There were a narrow set of wooden steps/stairs which were fenced off with a wooden barrier and a no entry sign. We were allowed to enter, so we did!
Apart from the concrete walls, and pillars, and the fact that all the light here unnatural, the kegs help to identify that we’re actually in the wine cellar. Here is where there are hundreds of huge barrels of vintages from over the years, all neatly labelled on the front. You might be able to guess that Lars here is a bit of a connoisseur judging by the huge grin as he checks out the stock.
Back upstairs on the ground level, you can see how the kegs have been stored and labelled. Kind of makes you want your very own barrel doesn’t it?
Sadly, it is how I mentioned at the beginning, and whilst I’m a huge fan of Merlot, I can’t say I was particularly fond of some of the wines that we tasted. In fact, I found the majority of them far too sweet and sickly for my personal tastes, but all was not lost, some of us actually really enjoyed them. I’d show you the pictures, but they’re a bit less flattering for some people, and no one really wants their grimacing faces plastered on the internet!
If you’ve not been wine tasting before, Barossa Valley is as good a place as any to lose your tasting virginity. It’s quiet, serene and well, it’s in Australia. Everyone knows that they make the best wines in Australia (some of them, at least).
There are a ton of wineries to choose from though, and I’ve only managed to visit one of them. If you have any personal recommendations on which are the best to visit, then please let me know so that I can pass the word along and other people can make the most of their visit to South Australia.
