Wines Galore!

Tyler and I spent the weekend exploring the Barossa Valley - which is literally the Napa Valley of all of Australia. It is a good bit different from Napa though because all the wineries have FREE tastes of anywhere from 10-20 different wines. Crazy. We headed up on Saturday morning to the town of Tanunda which is kinda in the heart of the Barossa Valley. It's about 90 km from Adelaide. We checked into our little cabin and took out the bikes that they offered us. I had my first experience riding a tandum bike - it was super exciting! Unfortunately we weren't able to get the tires pumped up enough to spend the day riding those around. We biked with them to the first winery which was only like 1/4 mile away and then after doing the tastings there - we biked back to exchange the tandem bike for 2 individual bikes...sad.

We then went to 2 more wineries in the area of our cottage - basically next door to the first one we had gone to. After that - biking wasn't so easy so we walked the bikes back to the cottage before dinner. We headed out to downtown Tanunda (which is just a really tiny little town with probably about 5 restaurants in it) for dinner. It was delicious!
Sunday we continued our wine exploration - but this time I took over the driving - and Tyler handled most of the tasting. We went to 6 different wineries - and each had from 10-20 tastes. The tastes aren't really THAT small either - usually doing all the tastes would amount to 2-3 glasses of wine! Crazy! Some of the wineries were really cool. Rockford had a cool atmosphere being in old remodeled buildings like a stable and blacksmith shop. Charles Melton Winery had a neat atmosphere of sitting down at a long table for the tastes instead of the less personable standing at the bar idea that all other wineries do. We even had a cheese plate to go with our wine there! It was delicious! I think overall our top 3 wineries from the weekend were: Longmeil Winery, Rockford Winery, and Charles Melton Winery. All very tasty - especially the reds since its more the climate for those grapes around here.... Too bad I can only bring 2 bottles back in to the US - otherwise I could have a wine party :)