The Barossa

This weekend my friend from college, Gabe Nelson, came for a trip up to the wine country of the Barossa Valley and the surrounds. It turned out to be a great adventure. After navigating the often-unreliable bus system to the airport to meet Gabe, we headed to the Central Market for some dumplings. Saturday morning, we had loaded up the rental car and headed into the Hills.

We actually had a fair bit of rain during the night, and it was still quite cloudy in the morning. However, as we climbed up into the hills toward Mt. Lofty, the weather “fined up,” as the Aussie weather forecasters say. I hadn’t seen Gabe since before he came to Australia almost two years ago, so it was great to hang out, chat, and laugh as we enjoyed the view over Adelaide and drove on through the hills.

GPS navigation has definitely come a long way, but we had a few issues with ours. Probably I should say that I had a standing disagreement with it. Either it tried to send us entirely on highways, or it directed us to take dirt roads that dead-ended in the middle of nowhere. Despite some skepticism from the driver, using the gazetteer worked quite well. And given the low clearance and squeaky shocks of the Toyota rental car, I’m glad that it did.

After following the road up and down and through about a dozen name changes (including Cork Screw Road), we arrived in the Barossa Valley, or typically just “the Barossa.” The Barossa has been full of vineyards since the 19th century and is the best known of the wine regions around Adelaide, standing well above the Clare Valley and McLaren Vale in notoriety (particularly outside of Australia). A favorite escape of Adelaideans and tourists alike is to head out to the Barossa for wine tasting and great food. We started our pursuit of these twin goals with lunch at Lyndoch Bakery, followed by our first call at a winery—Burge Family Winemakers. If you ever find yourself in the Barossa, definitely focus on the small wineries. You’ll find out a great deal more about the grapes, the people who own the vineyard and make the wine (almost always the same people in these small vineyards), and the wines themselves from someone who is happy to talk to you one-on-one and is probably closely connected to the winemaking. The larger wineries are much more perfunctory with a more impersonal atmosphere—have a taste and either buy some or go on your way. If you were going out for Italian food, would you go to a local trattoria run by a Milanese family or would you go to the Olive Garden? It isn’t that the larger wineries don’t produce some excellent wines, but you can usually buy them in the grocery store (at least here in Adelaide). And in our brief experience this weekend, the quality and taste of the wines from the smaller wineries was almost always much higher (which certainly could have had a lot to do with the atmosphere).

Back to the Burge Family, who have one of these small wineries. In the wine community there is a fair bit of concern about the demise of many regional grapes due to the expansion of about a dozen varieties that you have undoubtedly heard of and probably dominate the wine shelf in your local grocery store. The Barossa is one area that bucks this trend to at least some extent. One of the wines that the Burge Family is known for is their Semillon, a white grape that once was well known. Today I would be surprised if most of you reading this have ever heard of it—I certainly hadn’t before coming to the Barossa. The Semillon was a lovely wine to taste, as was their Grenache, another grape that falls outside of the widely produced varieties. Grenache vines are what is known as dry-grown, thriving on normal rainfall and thus requiring little or no irrigation. Over their long lives Grenache vines sink roots 10 to 20 meters into the ground to take advantage of subsurface groundwater. This makes them ideal for Australia, although the vines take longer than typical to mature and begin producing grapes that can be used for wine. The flip side to this waiting period is that the vines are incredibly long-lived and the grapes actually improve with age—several Grenaches that we tasted this weekend were from 70 and 80 year-old vines. Chelsea liked this wine most because it doesn’t require irrigation water to survive, which means grapes can grow and rivers can flow, all at the same time.

After a mistaken stop at a larger winery that will remain anonymous, we found Bethany Wines, situated in an old quarry on a back road. The woman at the cellar door (the front tasting part of a winery) was terribly friendly, and we found ourselves talking about the Barossa, Adelaide, the Tour Down Under (which in some years has come right in front of Bethany), and our purposes for being in Australia. Part of me wanted to just hang out there for the rest of the afternoon, but eventually we decided it was time to move on. Before we left, however, we did taste what would typically be an $85 bottle of wine—open special for that weekend. Having never tasted wine that expensive, I can say that I do now understand why a person will pay that much for a bottle. No plans to rush out and start doing so, but certainly a very, very enjoyable wine.

Following the roads to the northwest, we came to the Seppeltsfield Winery, a Barossa landmark. I have maligned the larger wineries of the Barossa in this post, so it bears saying that they are not as terrible as I make them out to be. They do produce the majority of the wine that comes out of the Barossa, which includes nearly all of the Barossa vintage that can be bought outside of the valley. And some of their wines are very good. It’s just that we weren’t here for wine that could be bought elsewhere in Australia—that would defeat the purpose. But back to Seppeltsfield, which was founded by the Seppelts family in the 19th century. They grew hundreds of acres of vines prospered for decades and were bought by a larger wine producer, eventually passing by the late 20th century to the Fosters company, which owns Penfolds and a number of other large Australian wine labels. In the last ten years, however, the winery has actually been bought back by the Seppelts Family—one of the few times that you will hear of that happening. We didn’t actually taste their wine, but we did stop at the family mausoleum up the road. Topping a hill with a lovely view and flanked by palm trees, the Roman-styled mausoleum is a bit of an oddity in the landscape, but reading the list of members of the Seppelts family that are buried there, you get a feel for just how long they have been making wine in the Barossa.

On our way back towards the main towns of Tanunda and Nuriootpa, we stopped at Heritage Winery on a whim. You couldn’t have picked a sharper contrast to Seppeltsfield. The proprietor of the cellar door was watering the plants when we arrived. While we played with the puppy, she went into her house and got the key to the cellar door. The vines, planted in the 70s or 80s by a local wine enthusiast, stretched out behind the house and the cellar door. The wines were not my favorite of the day, but they were far better than many others we had tried, and the personal experience was unbeatable.

We finished the touring part of our day with a stop at Maggie Beer’s farm. Maggie Beer, if you haven’t heard of her, is somewhat of a South Australian icon. About the time we arrived in Adelaide, she was voted the Senior Australian of the Year, which might be a bit like getting a Presidential Medal of Freedom in the US. Maggie and her husband Colin started raising and selling pheasants in the 1970s, and she became quite good at cooking them and making various dishes (particularly paté, for which she is famous) involving pheasants. One thing led to another and today Maggie markets a wide range of gourmet foods including patés, ice creams, savory jams, dukkahs, and more. And she teaches cooking classes in her spare time—we saw her through a glass door, busy at her work. She looks a bit like your favorite aunt, bustling from one thing to another, quick to smile and laugh. And we found her burnt fig ice cream to be just the thing after a long day and perhaps one too many wine tastings. We sat on the deck overlooking the pond, chatting and eating, as a slight sprinkle passed through.

From Maggie Beer’s, we headed for our lodgings in Springton. Springton is a bit off the beaten track in the Barossa—in fact, it’s not really in the Barossa at all, but in Eden Valley, the adjacent vale to the east. After arriving and checking in with the friendly proprietors we entered ‘The Stables,’ which were once precisely that. They had been re-done in slightly unusual but quite enjoyable shades of red and purple, with a smattering of the corrugated sheet metal that is ubiquitous in rural Australia. We made use of the well-stocked kitchen to cook up some kangaroo steaks, potatoes, and sautéed vegetables for dinner, which turned out excellently. The advice we received on cooking ‘roo is right on—hot and fast. After dinner, some people were hankering for something sweet, so we headed next door to Buck’s Bistro, which is run by the same couple as the Stables. After a bit of a chat, we had some excellent dessert that Chelsea was particularly excited about (see the previous post). After a walk to look at the stars and the Herbig Tree, we eventually drifted off toward bed.

In the morning, it was up and over to Buck’s for a tasty English breakfast (included with the room). After some back-and-forth, we were convinced that no Australian experience would be complete without Vegemite. Although the kitchen was somehow out of it that morning, the cook popped next door and came back with some of the yeasty stuff, adored by some and feared by others. In retrospect, it is quite salty but doesn’t have an overwhelming taste otherwise. I found it quite tasty, and ended up having about four slices of toast with it—I can definitely see how a Vegemite sandwich would be perfect for long bike rides or Rogaining.

We capped off our Barossa visit with a hike in Kaiser Stuhl Conservation Park. The trail rambles up and down over the landscape of the hills that separate the Barossa from Eden Valley. We saw kangaroos and wallabies, not to mention the largest stand of pines we have yet encountered in Australia. Part-way through the hike, it turned out that the return part of the loop was closed, so we hopped the fence and wandered across fields to make our way back. It turned out to be a nice way to finish, with the fields stretching away in front of us, the occasional trees and rock outcroppings dotting the landscape.

On the way home we stopped in the German town of Hahndorf, nestled in the Adelaide Hills. Hahndorf advertises itself as the ‘oldest German town in Australia,’ and it has a well-deserved reputation for its sausage. It also has a fair bit of tourist kitsch, but we found some enjoyable German food and (I say this somewhat sheepishly) an amazing gingerbread latte. For all that I have said against coffee in my life, Australia has forced me to eat my words. Don’t get me wrong, I will never be a ‘cup-a-day’ sort of fellow, but the coffee here is really quite nice.

As I write this, the rain is pelting down on the roof of our flat. Not so good for getting out and about, but great for the vines. With this much water from the sky, 2010 should be a good vintage for the Barossa winemakers.