Our 1st visit to wine country saw us head to the Mclaren Vale.
This is a region not to far away from where we were staying. We visited Paxtons first, they are a small winery, who are heavily into Biodynamic farming to make their wine. Makes them stand out from just about every other producer and also has yielded some very tasty results. It’s always a much better experience we learned, when the person you are talking to is passionate about their topic. And believe it or not, there was at least one that definitely made the experience worse than any of the others by not really being into the whole experience. Really showed through and portrayed their Cellar Door in the worst light of all those that we visited.
Lunch time and to The Elbow room – new restaurant with the ex chef from the D’arenbourg winery. Lovely location and as we were fine with the heat, we were the first people to sit out in the courtyard. Lovely food and in complete heathen style, actually had a cold beer with lunch. The locally brewed beer to Adelaide is Coopers and their pale ale became my drink of choice whilst there. It’s brewed in the bottle so you have the unique serving suggestion of rolling the bottle before opening to mix all the sediment!! Tastes good and as I was told, because it’s all local and organic, doesn’t give you a headache. I tried, and it’s true!! No headache!!
After a lengthy lunch we headed to Fox Creek. It was at this point we realized that it’s hard to fit more than 1 or 2 vineyards into a day!! We got to Fox Creek and the lady there was great. They have the oldest vines in the region, over 100 years old and the wine they produced, in 2009, was lovely, so much so that I bought a bottle – not only because of the taste but also as it qualified for their Scarce Earth initiative which I thought is a great local initiative for the McLaren Vale area http://www.mclarenvale.info/scarceearth
As advised, I am going to cellar it for about 5 years an then it will be perfect 🙂 One suggestion for the vineyards is to definitely look into booking a mini bus. Matt my brother in law was very kind and drove us around. You can do it driving because you can spit out all the wines rather than drink them all, but definitely a good idea to get a taxi/minibus service booked. Also might want to look into doing a Cheese and Wine Tour through either Blessed Cheese – http://www.blessedcheese.com.au/index-3.html in the McLaren Valley or perhaps Udder Delights in the Adelaide Hills- http://udderdelights.com.au/adelaide-hills-cheese-wine-trail/ Didn’t get a chance to do one, but will be going back to do one for sure!! Came highly recommended, sis has subsequently tried Udder Delights and it’s awesome!
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