March 01, 2007
Barossa Valley
Here's us making off with a small portion of our stash from Two Hands Winery.
Thanh and I rented a car early Wed morning and drove the 50KM up to the Barossa Valley. While we were there, we managed to do wine tastings at four wineries and get in a nice lunch. Four wineries in one day is pretty much the limit we can do, based on Thanh's low tolerance, and the need for one of us to drive the car back home.
Here's a rundown of the places we hit and the wines we got. We look forward to sharing them with everyone when we're back in NY.
Two Hands
First place we stopped, a little shop with a very talkative wine steward. Seriously, this first stop took over an hour, and most of the time was her yapping away. Still, we loved the Brilliant Disguise which was a lightly carbonated white wine, and the Aerope which was a 100% Grenache which is a bit unusual, but fruity and delicious. Thanh is on a bit of a Grenache kick (I didn't even know what that was before this trip) so we tried all Grenache wines at a few stops.
Torbreck
Torbreck is Thanh's favorite Barossa Valley winary, and it didn't disappoint.
We picked up a case of the 2005 Steading which is a 100% Shiraz. We also loved the Les Amis which was another 100% Granache, possibly even better than the Aerope we bought. Unfortunately, the Les Amis was sold out, but we were told we may be able to find some in the US though, so we'll be on the lookout. Their top of the line Shiraz, called RunRig was outstanding, but at $225/bottle in the winery, seemed a bit expensive.
Kabinye
After our first two tastings, we needed to take a break from the wine, so we went to the Kabinye Cafe for some lunch. Thanh tried to persuade me to get the Roo, but I couldn't believe it would really taste well. I ended up with the Chicken, which probably tastes just like Roo anyway. We weren't crazy about the wines here, their most notable wine was a Rose, which neither of us were too impressed with. We did however like the Hubert Shiraz and the Frontignac dessert wine. We ended up with one bottle of each.
Charles Melton
This was our last stop, and it was frankly a little disappointing. I think the wines we had here were all too similar for us to really tell apart. Possibly we had had too much wine at that point to tell them apart. They were all Shiraz or Shiraz/Grenache blends. We ended up buying one bottle of the Charles Melton Shiraz, which was quite good, but not noticeably better than the other wines they served us.
After filling ourselves, we made one more stop in Barossa at the whispering wall. It's a huge damn with acoustics setup so that you can whisper at one end and the sound will be carried all the way to the other side. There are a few pictures of this over in my Flickr photos.