Tuesday, 18 April, 2017
Happy Birthday, Julie! None of us registered this until Jan later in the day.
In any case, we travel today to the Barossa Valley for the main highlight of our road trip – the Barossa Valley Vintage festival. We went to this 4 years ago and it was quite good so wanted to bring Jan and Hugh to it this year.
We have a small breakfast in the Motel in Jan & Hugh’s room as it is bright and sunny on their side. Julie and Hugh had some fruit they had bought in Penola yesterday while Jan and I shared her takeaway steak from last night. The ubiquitous bleu cheese also featured.
We drive out of Coonawarra, through Padthaway and join the Western Highway at Keith. We drive for a couple of hours and decide it could be time for more coffee and a toilet stop. We stop in the fine town of Coonalpyn.
Coonalpyn is not my favourite town in the world because many years ago, in the 70s, I was driving over to Adelaide on the Thursday before Easter when my car broke down totally in Coonalpyn. We were forced to stay the night in the local Hotel and then leave the car behind to eventually get fixed. We were lucky enough to get a ride from another Hotel guest to Adelaide airport where are Adelaide friends picked us up. We still went around to wineries at Barossa and McClaren Vale and took the train back to Coonalpyn when the car was fixed. We loaded around 20 dozen boxes of wine on the train and then took them off at Coonalpyn station.
Jan and Julie crossed the street from where we had our coffee and went to the loo.
The girls had walked through the big city, population 231 in 2006, and had seen several vintage cars in some kind of rally.
We got back on the road and turned off the Western Highway at Murray Bridge (town) to go the back way into Barossa. We go over the Old Murray Bridge and are very lucky because it was closed yesterday and will be tomorrow. We eventually drive through the back way in and over the hills to Tanunda and our Airbnb place for the next 4 nights, The Barossa Villa. It is large, modern, well appointed and very comfortable. No photos, but refer to the following link. They have left us some breakfast stuff and figs from the vine outside.
After settling in we are finally hungry so have some more of the wonderful bleu cheese eventually with some figs. After Julie returned from going for a walkabout, we decide to go to a couple of wineries. For those that don’t know Australia, Barossa is a large wine growing area with a significant number of wineries. There are over 150 wineries and over 80 cellar doors. The Barossa was originally settled in the mid 19th century, primarily by German immigrants. It still has that German feel with Wurst shops and delis and restaurants albeit probably not as much when I first went there in the 70s.
The Barossa was originally famous for its white wines, especially riesling, and cheap sparklings but in recent years has become famous for its premium Reds, especially Shiraz. The first winery we go to is Murray Street where we had done well four years ago.
The Server is very interesting as she had an Eastern Europe accent but was actually from South Africa.
I found the wines OK but probably a bit expensive for what they were. Next we go to Seppelts. It is a very large wine company with large land/building holdings in Barossa, Hunter, Great Western etc. We stop by but it would seem that they were in a transition period where nothing was open.
Our Airbnb host, Wyndham, had suggested and then booked our restaurant for the night – Appellation. On Tuesday nights it has a special “locals night”. There is no menu and the chef prepares special dishes to bring to the tables. We arrive early and have a drink.
We are one of the first to our table. Each course has two different dishes which are randomly distributed to us. There was a lot of interesting dishes, as follows, but I am not sure what many of them were.
Link to Appellation as a part of the Louise complex
We departed for home and crash after a pretty good day. We have another big one tomorrow.