Vines eveywhere
We have just revisited the Barossa Valley and the Clare Valley where some of Australia’s best wine is grown. Both are also beautiful areas so it is well worth spending a full day exploring each. This time I decided to avoid all the big name wineries, some of whose wines you see in supermarkets up and down the UK.
Penfolds
The wine on sale at the cellar doors is usually their best wine and some is not on sale elsewhere. However a top wine from Penfold’s will cost you $100 and upwards.
In Barossa valley we stoped at Two Hands, Whistler and Penfold’s. Two hands is a small winery which buys in grapes from other vineyards. 
Whistler is a new vineyard with great wine and we met the owner’s wife who was delightful. They had bought the land about 15 years ago and have slowly developed the winery from experiance her husband developed as winemaker at Penfold’s. Some vines were planted from cuttings of vines used to make the famous Penfold’s Grange wine. Their Riesling and Shiraz were excellent. We ended up buying too much wine.
Clare Valley is famous for Riesling wine. This time we randomly stopped at Annie’s Lane which is in a beautiful position.
Annies Lane
They had just started harvesting this year’s Reisling. Here actually we bought more Shiraz than Riesling and after the boss gave me some of their reserve Shiraz “Copertrail” – it was so good that I had to buy a bottle of that as well. Having said that I would say that the wines we bought both in Barossa and Clare were probably 20% cheaper than equivalent wines from the big names. I doubt whether I will be able to take more than 2 bottles back with me so we will end up drinking a few of them and giving the rest away to Naomi.
Kapunda Museum
The other interesting town on the way was Kapunda which once was the richest town in South Australia owing to the copper mine there and because it was the home of Sidney Kidman the “Cattle King”. He started out as a 13 year old runaway and ended up the world’s largest property owner with cattle stations across huge stretches of central and northern Australia. The museum had a quite incredible range of bric a brac, machinery, dentists’ chairs, etc. from the turn of the century. It was manned by two elderly women who were keen to explain everything in minute detail. I was thinking how great it was that these women (probably volunteers in their late 70’s) had something active to keep busy everyday.
