Hunter Valley, the Napa of Australia

We were enticed by wine country, and spent 3 nights there. We worked all day our first day (good internet = time to catch up!), and the next day we ventured into the vineyards…

We spent a lot of time at one winery, Tyrrell’s. The property was beautiful, so we had a picnic lunch at the picnic tables before taking the tour & winetasting.

The winery was established in 1858, and founder Edward Tyrrell built himself this single-room house to live in the same year.

The winery’s vineyards are in a gorgeous setting. The tour that we took is easily the best winery tour we’ve ever been on (sorry, Napa). Our tour guide, the wine-grower, is extremely passionate and knowledgeable about grapes (as a wine-grower would be) – he gave us a lot of interesting info about the nuances - the smallest difference in soil, rainfall, age of vines, vine-spacing, harvest timing (etc), makes a big difference in how the wine tastes…

This is one of the places where they crush grapes – it is still used for a few wines, but they also have big machines that do the same thing. I volunteered to get in there.

And, huge barrels of wine – they are a bigger winery now, about 500,000 cases per year. They are known for their shiraz.

Next we stopped at McGuigan winery, and sampled some wines as well as fresh cheese from the cheese shop next door.

Our final stop was at this winery shaped like a barrel (and, a um, airplane hangar??), where Vince learned all about cricket, and we bought a great bottle of dessert Semillon. Mmmm.