Emma & Luke's hazey shiraz trail

Saturday 20th Oct signaled the start of our wine tour of McLaren Valley. We took Autumn to the beautiful rolling vineyards of one Australia's most highly regarded producers of Shiraz wines.

All dolled up in our dress (Luke) and shirt (Emma - only kidding, just keeping you on your toes) and checked in at the local caravan site, which I will mention seemed an absolute luxury to us by this point: running hot showers, kitchen facilities including a freezer to cool our ice packs, clothes lines and washing facilities, etc... Sorry I've gone off on a tangent now. So - all checked in at the site we set off along the '5km Shiraz trail' (distance kindly calculated by Luke) to our vineyards of choice. We went to Serafino Wines first, where we tried a few whites and then moved on to some of their award winning reds and received a little insider's knowledge of Shiraz and some helpful spiel to aid us in our consecutive cellar door visits. We set off shortly after along the trail toward our second choice, Battle of Bosworth Wines, to sample some of the only organically certified wines of McLaren Vale, situated at the very far end of the trail. An hour or so later we reached the vineyard only to find it was closed for a function that day... Due to our fantastic mood, not at all due to our consumption of fine wine, we were not perturbed. We hitched a lift back and flew by two more cellar doors, Primo and one of our favorites; Hugh Hamilton/ Black Sheep where we also sampled some of their olive oils and salad dressings. Later that evening we dined in with home-made curry and some more of the local wine, well - it would have been rude not to!

On Sunday we took Autumn along with us and managed to see another six cellar doors. We were a little more clued up the next day and didn't drink every tasting we were given so were able to hold out a little longer. We included the Battle of Bosthworth, Leconfield, Lloyd Brothers, d'Arenberg - my fave and personally recommended to those of you reading my blog, Corriole and finishing up at Samuel's Gorge. All in all a rather exhausting weekend at McLaren Vale!