Thankfully, I feel better than yesterday and am ready for the wine tasting tour. Can being well be purely psychosomatic?
Our first stop is at Neagles Rock Winery, which sells about 120,000 bottles a year. Our wine tasting is a hasty affair here, and I buy a couple bottles of the Semillon Sauvignon Blanc. The Shiraz is also good, but as this area is noted for Shiraz, I hold off for our later stops. Nobody spits out anything though, and there are a few of the more delicate tasters already getting a bit tipsy.
At Pikes, a 50,000 bottles a year winery, I buy the Riesling and something called ‘White Mullet’, which sounds nasty, but is actually a delicate blend of Riesling, Semillon, Sauvignon Blanc and Viognier. As we get back on the bus, a round of group spanking kicks off which will last the rest of the day.
For lunch, we stop at the Magpie & Stump, where our guide Steve is expecting them to serve twenty unexpected patrons in forty five minutes. I have a couple of Aussie ciders while I am waiting, and they are nicely light and smooth, which wasn’t what I expected.
We have a couple of other stops after lunch at the Pauletts and Mintaro wineries, but I regret not getting the Shiraz at Neagles Rock as by these latter stops I have lost the ability to differentiate by taste.
There is a mic & PA on the bus which our guide Steve has been making use of to impart information and give us our schedule deadlines, but I hijack it, repeating my truck song at the request of Belgian Sam, though I suspect everyone else is bored with it by now. However, when I get to the Caz verse, I pass it over to her to repeat her catchphrase, which she has made me promise not to repeat in public. Suffice to say that this delicate wall flower had not yet revealed her inner self in front of Steve since we arrived in Oz, and I think he is quite taken aback by her forthright manner on the mic.
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