Wine

The new job forced an extra weeks holiday on me without any say in the matter. So it seems I've worked two weeks and have already had to use up lots of my allocated holidays. With no plans made and no car our options were pretty limited. A tour of the Hunter Valley was on the cards. We squeezed into a mini van outside Sydney YHA and with 10 others drove about 2 hours north of the city into wine country. I've been pretty cynical when it comes to wine and the associated vocabulary - "notes of chocolate", "bouquet of strawberries", "hints of stables??" - but I have to say that I totally got into the mood of it all. Any while I didn't detect any taste other than what you'd expect from grapes, there IS a difference beyond just being red or white. The landscape of there area isn't exactly rural France. It looks like what it really is - a swathe of Eucalyptus cut out of a shallow valley and replaced with an uneven patchwork of vineyards. But it does look nice. We visited three different places, the first of which we arrived at 10.30 and the driver double-checked that no one had a problem drinking lots of wine before mid morning. The vineyard (or winery here) was some faux-Spanish villa built by a retired English guy and it certainly added to the atmosphere (much nicer than the some of the modified tin shacks evident elsewhere). With this place and the next, the owners gave us menus and described the differences between everything we tasted, when and why the grapes were picked at certain times, and all the food that would go well with it. Their enthusiasm certainly rubbed off and the whole experience was pretty enjoyable. The third place we visited was a little bit of a downer. It was in the afternoon, the day was absolutely boiling and everybody had probably drank a little too much at that stage. It didn't help that when we got there we were shown to the basement, looking like an underground German beer hall, and our wine expert was a young American lady who couldn't offer much in the way of useful advice beyond just saying she really like each one. I'm not sure anyone bought anything from that place. On the way back the driver turned on the overhead DVD player and showed us, of course, a wine movie. I thought it might be interesting to watch Sideways but instead we got to see "A Good Year", an awful and boring Russell Crowe flick that must have been designed to put everyone to sleep.