Barossa Valley, Part One

My day’s activity out of Adelaide today was a wine-tasting day trip to the Barossa Valley. My impression is that Barossa Valley is to South Australia as Napa Valley is to California. But that’s just my impression. I didn’t hear it from anyone else. So I may be wrong about that.

The point is, the valley is lousy with vineyards and wineries. Having said that, the driver/guide, Brian, also spoke highly and at length of the Clare Valley and its wineries and culture. He strongly recommended visiting it if we have time. So maybe it’s the Clare Valley that is the Napa of South Australia. I don’t know.

Never listen to me. I rarely know what I’m talking about. You’d be well advised to go out and have some fun instead of reading this. What are you even doing here?

(By the way, speaking of not knowing what I’m talking about. Brian might in fact be Bryan. He only said his name. He didn’t spell it. However, all of the phonetically Brians I’ve known have been Brians, not Bryans. So that’s what I’m going with here.)

Just a warning, because I spent the majority of today either on a minibus or tasting wine, there will be fewer photos than normal in this entry and the next one. Sorry about that. You’re stuck with mostly just my words.

(To my former editor: How the hell did you wade through my writing all that time and live to still be a friend?)

On the way up to the Barossa Valley, Brian yammered extensively about the history, politics, architecture, geography, and climate of, first, Adelaide, then, more broadly, South Australia, and finally more specifically about the Adelaide Hills and the Barossa Valley.

Women’s Vote

Of course, I don’t remember much of what he said. But I do remember that Brian said that, in 1894, South Australia was the first state in Australia to give women the vote and allow them to go to university. That greatly upset the colonial powers back in Britain. They didn’t want South Australia to set a precedent. But South Australia did it anyway and others did follow.

Also according to Brian, South Australia was only the fourth place in the world to give women the vote. New Zealand just barely beat them.

Brian said that on one tour when he gave the above facts, a woman on the minibus pulled out her phone and fact-checked him via Google. She said his facts were correct, however, not only that, but South Australia was the first place in the world to allow women to be elected to parliament.

Here’s the thing. I think it’s healthy to be somewhat skeptical of “factual” information provided by tour guides. But you should also be skeptical of what you find on many sites on the internet. You might end up disbelieving a truth in favour of a falsehood as a result of your “fact-checking.”

Free-Settled

Another probably true factoid from the mouth of Brian is that South Australia is the only Australian state that is free-settled. All the others had some convicts shipped there by force, most from Britain in its colonial days. Everyone who settled in South Australia, on the other hand, came of their own free will.

Brian sounds like a very proud fifth-generation South Australian. The fifth-generation part sounds like that because that’s what he said he is. I inferred the proud part.

The Drive to Barossa Valley

The drive up to the Barossa Valley was quite picturesque. We twisted and turned through scenic roads. The land was well-treed hills and valleys and some grasslands. The grasslands along the way were either green-sandy-brown or entirely sandy-brown. The reason for the tinges of green is that they got a brief deluge of rain a few days ago.

This is, apparently, a normally very arid region. I heard two people today, Brian and one of the people at one of the wineries, say that South Australia is the driest state in the driest continent in the world.

Along the way to our first stop of the day, some wild kangaroos lounged in a field on the right side of the road. Then I turned my head and saw a couple of wild emus in a field on the left side of the road.

(You probably figured this out, but when I said “wild” in reference to the kangaroos and emus in the preceding paragraph I simply meant that they weren’t in captivity. I didn’t mean to imply that they were partying with wild abandon or some such thing. They weren’t.)

You’ve got to love Australia. I think the Australian government will deport you if you don’t.

Brian explained that he takes a straighter, expressway route back because if we partake in all of the wine tastings today, as most people do on these tours, we’ll consume the equivalent of about a bottle and a half before the end of the day. He suggested that driving a busload of people along twisty roads after they drank that much wine can get messy.

Barossa Dam and Reservoir

On the way to our first winery, we stopped at the Barossa Reservoir and its dam. The reservoir was attractive enough, but not spectacular. The dam, on the other hand, had an amazing feature.

On each end of the dam, on the dry side, platforms hang off the walls of the canyons “downstream” from the damn. (“Downstream” is in quotes because it didn’t look like they were letting any water through the damn. There didn’t appear to be any stream on the dry side. But it was far enough down that I probably wouldn’t see a small stream even if it was there.)

The platforms are positioned such that the heads of people of a normal height, and maybe even a little taller, are somewhat below the top of the dam. Mine was somewhat lower than that.

Here’s the thing. The distance from the platform on one side of the damn to the platform across the canyon on the other side of the dam is 140 metres (almost 460 feet). Brian told us to stay on the platform on the side of the dam where he parked the minibus. He then traversed a walkway on the top of the dam to the other side.

When he stood on the platform on the other side he spoke to us in a normal voice. I heard him perfectly, pretty much as if he was standing on the same platform as we were.

The dam wasn’t built with the intent of creating that effect. It is a serendipitous outcome of its parabolic shape. It is amazing.

For obvious reasons, the powers that be officially nicknamed the dam as “The Whispering Wall.”

Chateau Yaldara

Our first winery stop in the Barossa Valley was at Chateau Yaldara. According to the winery staff member who conducted the tasting there, yaldara is an aboriginal word for sparkling. Chateau Yaldera got its start making sparkling white wines.

I don’t know if they produce sparkling whites anymore. There weren’t any in the tasting.

By the way, the tasting leader was a very personable, informative, wryly humorous local with a pronounced Glaswegian accent. She was born in Glasgow in 1966, but has lived in Australia for more than 40 years. How do I know all this? I did mention that she’s very personable, didn’t I? All of that was part of her patter. She also told the group her name, but I forgot it.

The tasting at Chateau Yaldara included six wines. Yes, six. To be fair, they were only tastings. Each consisted of about three sips. Four if you take small sips. Two if you take gulps.

Despite being small tastings rather than full glasses, six tastings made me happy. I may be dead by the end of the day. If so, I probably won’t post this.

The tastings at Chateau Yaldara proceeded in a colour progression. The first was a white wine, a Sauvignon Blanc. It had an intense taste of grapefruit, gooseberry, and lime zest, with a zingy finish.

I know that because that’s what it said on the printed tasting notes. I rarely—exceptionally rarely—taste what the tasting notes tell me I’m supposed to taste. I can occasionally discern what a tasting note says is an oaky taste, but that’s about it.

The other wines were a Rosé, a Cabernet Sauvignon, a Shiraz, a Sparkling Petit Verdot, and a Tawny Port.

Despite “Verdot “ being derived from the French word for green, it’s a red wine. It’s a green grape that turns red when it matures. I learned that only today. Today I also learned that there is such a thing as a sparkling red wine. I’ve had and enjoyed sparkling whites like Champagne, Prosecco, and Cava. And I’ve heard of sparkling rosés. But I had no idea sparkling reds existed.

The Sparkling Petit Verdot tasted nothing like sparkling whites. It tasted like a bubbly red wine, but lighter and more fruity than the reds I tend to drink.

The last wine in the tasting was labelled as a Tawny, but the tasting leader universally referred to it as a Tawny Port. She said they couldn’t legally label it as such because it’s not from Portugal.

I did a port tasting when I was in Porto, Portugal. From what I remember, this one tasted a lot like the tawny port I tasted there. Then again, I’ve already referred to my taste discernment deficiency. So who knows?

My favourite of the wines was the Shiraz. It had a full-bodied, yummy taste. (As you can tell, I’ve become something of an oenophile as a result of this tour. Before today, I couldn’t possibly have come up with a description of a wine anywhere nearly as expressive and sophisticated as “full-bodied and yummy.”)

Something I learned at Chateau Yaldara is that Barossa Valley is a subset of Barossa, which includes other valleys. As a result, while Yaldara can label some of its wines as Barossa Valley, it can label some others as Barossa, but not Barossa Valley because the grapes come from another valley in the Barossa region.

I’d never heard of Barossa or Barossa Valley before this trip. So that was all new to me.

Tanunda

We next stopped at a town in the Barossa Valley called Tanunda. Tanunda is a charming little town with a quaint main street, Murray Street. Small, independent shops and restaurants line both sides of Murray Street. The shops and the town itself have a very charming small-town feel to them.

There are also a couple of well-manicured parks near one end of the street, one of which has an attractive gazebo. The other park has a pleasant fountain.

Brian dropped us off at one end of the street. We had about 25 minutes to walk up the street to the other end, where he picked us up to take us to the next winery.

But I’ll leave this here for now while I’m still not much more incoherent than I usually am. I’ll put the rest of the tour in another entry.

I’ve already tasted six wines at a single winery. There are still two wineries to go, with more tastings at each. The sequel to this post could get interesting. And by interesting I mean brief and totally unreadable. It might be best to skip that one.

I’m already as happy as someone as morose as I can ever expect to be. The remaining wineries might tip me into delirium. We’ll see how it goes.