Monday, 17 April, 2017

Today we head into South Australian wine country with our first stay to be in Coonawarra. This is the home of the famous Terra Rossa or red soil which gives the wines some extra flavours making it arguably the best wine area in Australia for red wines, especially Cabernet. We start the day by leaving our fine Airbnb “barn”.

Note the barn on the right of picture, that was where we stayed. There are a few tourist sites around Portland but we decided to get on the road instead. We drive to Mt Gambier, the major city along the way, for petrol and brunch. The town is very crowded – it is Easter Monday and a lot of people are in transition as they end their 4 day Easter holiday. After petrol, we park and walk around looking for chow. A lot of the places are very crowded but a local points us to one off a side road. We go there, it is a large place and packed but we get the last available table.

There are a number of volcano craters and sink holes in the area. One famous tourist destination is the Blue Lake, a former volcano filled with water. During some times of the year / day, it is apparently bright blue – I have been there 3 times and never seen it that blue

We drive out of Mt Gambier to Penola which is the gateway to the wineries. Julie remembered going to an interesting herb farm when we were here 4 years ago and amazingly found it in the back streets of Penola. It had been run by a nice old lady but she was not there and probably had passed on.

After picking up some supplies, we drive into the wine area itself. We are staying in a Motel this night and when we arrive it is earlier than check-in time but the nice lady let us check-in any way. The Motel is structured as several single level wings with rooms back to back. We had a pair of these with a connecting door. We decide to go out to some wineries and the first stop was at Wynns, a large Coonawarra winery.

We tasted a number of good wines inside. I picked up a few bottles for the road. We then went on to Redman’s a multi-generational family owned winery. We try a few wines and I picked up some bargain basement Shiraz. But the most intriguing aspect was this:

It was explained to us that this is used to make a lot of their wines aiming for $20 bottles of wine. In my opinion Great Grandfather / Grandfather Bill / Owen Redman would have turned in their graves. Our last winery for the day was Bowen Estate. Doug Bowen and his wines had been a favourite of ours. Apparently he was in a consultant role now with his daughter being the wine maker.

We go back to the Motel for a bit of a rest before deciding what to do about dinner.

We went to a couple of good restaurants when here 4 years ago but it is a Monday night and they are closed. There is a restaurant in front of the Motel and we decide to go there. As we enter, we are their only customers – later another couple comes in, but that is it. Any way, the owner seems like a nice guy and the menu was OK so we order.

Jan didn’t eat a lot of it so we took the remainder for take away. We talked to the owner for a while and he explained that the restaurant used to be owned by the Motel owner. However, they went into receivership and he had bought the restaurant and the house associated with it. I hope he does OK but might be a challenge. Any way, the food was pretty good for a Motel restaurant.

We also talked to the other couple who came in after us. They had hit a Mother Kangaroo on the road, killing it and sending its Joey flying. Sad. They said there car, while drive-able, was quite a wreck and walking back to our rooms we saw it and it certainly was a mess. Off to bed!