McLaren Vale wine, lunch and Glenelg beach walk with Doull’s, Adelaide evening.
We caffeinate, throw laundry into the hotel’s machine, arrange for maids to dry it and put it in our room, and make tracks for vineyards in McLaren Vale, home of Shiraz, Cabernets, and Grenache and many more. The day is unseasonably warm and the sun is baking the earth. Typical annual rainfall in the Vale is 520mm and the area’s vineyards use an extra 100mm every year during the October-to-April growing season. When it’s all said and done, the Vale produces 35,000 tons of grapes annually.
First stop is Paxton Vineyard on the top of a very dry hill and surrounded by parched fields and, of course, hillsides of grape vines turning gold and rust red. The woman who serves our tastes is extremely knowledgeable about the process of keeping or removing skins to impart subtle bits of terroire to various wines. She also has a daughter who works on a farm in Wales because the daughter wanted to get a job at age 14 so she could travel the world. So mum walked door-to-door with her 14-year-old and got her the job and when the daughter had saved $29,000, she left with her backpack for Europe. Mum is going to join her this fall and they’re going to tramp around Spain, Portugal, France, elsewhere.
Second stop: Samuels Gorge, which is noted for its Grenache. It’s a small vineyard with a small tasting room behind a stone wall that keeps over-imbibers from rolling down a rather steep hill and then plunging into a barely visible gorge below. Hills all around, nice views, but we buy nothing.
Third stop is Hardy’s (remember we had a Hardy’s HRB Shiraz that we really liked back in Hobart). We still like it and like another bottle that you can get only at the vineyard. We taste a tawny port that is full of raisins and may be the first tawny that David likes. We leave with two pricey bottles of red and make our way to Gemtree Vineyard, where we will have afternoon tastes and lunch with John and Karen Doull, who now live in Glenelg, a southern suburb of Adelaide that was settled first of the two. We have not seen them since we stayed with them in Dublin, about 18 years ago.
They have since lived on three continents in different cities while we have remained on 43rd street the entire time. Neither of them looks a day older than we remember.
Gemtree’s porch, which has lovely views over brown hills with rows of sun-roasted vines, has small plates on its railing to keep the clouds of bees at bay. They invade a bit when we get our charcuterie platters, but they seem used to people and don’t mind being brushed away. David thinks a lot about the epi-pen he left back at the hotel.
From Gemtree in the Vale, we drive to John and Karen’s immaculate home in Glenelg and take a stroll to the long jetty in the middle of the city’s beach, which is dotted with bikini-clad bathers and all the other people who’ve come to see them. We walk around several large new buildings built recently along the beach. It’s much like walking along the new harbor-front on the Potomac in D.C.: mixed use buildings with restaurants below apartments and condominiums and hotels above them. Lots of open-air bars.
Sadly, Cynthia and I leave them and tool into Adelaide proper, where we have about an hour’s sunlight left to see part of the city. We walk along a wide boulevard in front of the Anzac Memorial, Adelaide university buildings, Art Gallery of Southern Australia, and David Jones department store. A sculpture by Lindy Lee called The Life of Stars stands in front of the art museum along a walkway lined with trees strung with cords of white Christmas lights. The evening is beautiful and we move through some arcades to get to Rundle Street, the main shopping way near the center of the city.
We’re restaurant hunting and check out Peel Street, which has a lot of trendy cocktail bars but no real food and settle on a place on Leigh Street, nearby, that looks empty at 6:45 but is totally filled by 7:00. It’s vaguely Japanese and wonderful. It has a drink called a Maronite, made with gin and Campari and the house’s version of “semi-dry, orange-inflused” vermouth. David is highly gruntled.
We gas up, drive a half hour home in the dark and prepare to go to the Barossa tomorrow early, before a long drive to Hall’s Gap.
Another day of old friends and new sites in Oz.
Two Tramps 