Today we plan to visit the Hunter Valley area and do some wine tasting. The Hunter Valley area is about 2 hours north of Sydney. The area is home to more than 120 wineries.
Rex picked us up in front of the Sydney Hilton at 7:10 am. A few other folks were on the small bus with us and we would stop later to pick up more. It rained most of the way to the winery but really not enough to quench the parched land.
McGuigan winery is the areas largest and was our first stop. It was about 10 am but no one thought it was too early to start in on the task.
Here we sampled these 8 wines.
The sparkling wine wasn’t worth a second taste but the rest were pretty good. McGuigan crushes 10% of all of the grapes in Australia. If I were to become a wine drinker, the Verdelho would be my choice off of this list.
As in most areas we have been in the world, any task taken on by most folks is interrupted with constant phone use.
The folk with we were with were from New Zealand, Hungary, Denmark, and Southern Australia. The woman on the right, (Allie) handles insurance claims made in fire destroyed areas. She and her husband Pete are from the southern part of New South Wales where the fires are extreme this year. We spent about an hour tasting and learning about these wines. All of the grape varieties in Australia have been imported from other countries since the grape is not a native fruit.
The Tawny is actually Port. Much like Champagne, Port that is not made in Portugal cannot be called Port. Champagne made outside of the Champagne region in France is referred to as sparkling wine. Port made outside of Portugal is called Tawny. Port is a fortified wine and this blend was quite good.
Terri bought the Tawny Port and the Black Label Shiraz Blend.
MacQuariedale was next on our stop. Ross, the owner of the winery, presented the wines. These are all organically produced wines and he explained what that meant. No herbicides, no pesticides, no synthetic fertilizer were used in producing the wines. In the USA, no sulfur dioxide can be used as a preservative in organic wine. Not so in Australia.
We learned that grapes will be picked in the next few weeks. Ross believed most of the wineries would not pick this year or would only produce a limited amount of “drink now” varieties of wine. The smoke from the bushfires gets into the grape and the smoke flavor isn’t noticeable until the wine has aged for a while. He said that they had three great years in a row and this year would be a down year.
Terri bought the Merlot here after about 8 tastings.
Lunch was next. We share pizza and salad with our fellow tasters at the Hunter Valley Restaurant.
This winery had a restaurant and store that sold wine from many different wineries. Lunch was great but we did not want to waste more tasting time. Next door we sampled more wine.
Four more wines were sampled here. Cheese and crackers were also offered. We bought some cheese here as none of the wines did much for us.
Next stop was the Hunter Valley distillery.
We sampled many of the vodkas and liqueurs out of test tubes that our host offered.
Next stop, sampling chocolate.
We reached our fill of wine and booze, cheese and chocolate and headed back to Sydney. A quick check of the temp.
A fun day! Tomorrow we have another hike planned!…