Post 9 - Greetings From the Barossa Valley - Journal

Our Barossa Salute
Well, we came and we went
And our budget’s now spent-
Having nibbled and tasted
There’s been nothing gone wasted!
We’ve troffed and we’ve scoffed
And sniffed wines that we’ve quaffed.
We’ve swirled and we’ve spat
Or swallowed and gone “splat!”

We’ve licked and smacked our overworked lips
Whilst simultaneously widening the size of our hips.
And yes, our bellies are now amply lined
But it would have been rude to have simply declined!

As a result I’m now far from scrawny –
But whilst my mouth is now numb
Not so my bum……
That’s more sticky brown than a Tawny!
(Caroline Cumming, 2009)

Yes, my friends, get ready – because this is a blog unashamedly devoted purely to the guzzling of sensational produce, food and wine….and brought to you mainly through photos! We can assure you we have raised more than a few glasses in salute to Australia’s best known wine region with its 60 cellar doors, 160 year old vines, butchers and bakers – not to mention restaurants, where modern sits comfortably alongside the more traditional fare of the early Silesian and German settlers, who have handed their recipes down the generations for us to enjoy!

The Barossa is totally different to McLaren Vale – for a start there’s more history here and a distinctive Europe-meets-Australia vibe, which is all due to the region being settled in the 1840’s by Silesians and German Lutherans fleeing religious persecution. Secondly, as a result of all that history, Barossa has some of the oldest vines in the world producing some of the most intense wines you’ll ever sample! And thirdly, what strikes you immediately as you enter the Valley is that the Barossa is a MASSIVE wine-making industry. Penfolds is the largest winery (it has the Southern Hemisphere’s largest Premium Red Barrel Cellar), and if that wasn’t big enough for you, then the Jacobs Creek vineyards that just go on and on for kilometers down the road to finally catch up with the huge and touristy “visitor centre” and massive steel, commercial-fermentation tanks, will surely make your eyes pop! Whilst there are many multi-award winning wines coming from some of the smaller and more laid back cellar doors, what also grabs your eye and drops your jaw is the scale of some of the big cellar doors that ooze history, trophy’s and prestige, with their magnificent, grand buildings - notables included Chateau Tanunda, Grant Burge (5th generation Barossa family owned winery) and Seppetsfield.

We sampled rare and back vintages with local cheeses at another tutored wine-tasting (Turkey Flat – small winery but home to the region’s second oldest vines) as well as enjoying a fantastic 2 hour historical heritage-tour and vintage-tasting of tawny ports, muscats and tokays at one of the giants, Seppetsfield - all the while adding more and more to our knowledge of fine wine. We also managed to surprise ourselves by coming away from the Barossa not with 13 bottles of shiraz but 13 bottles of rather stupendous rose wine instead - including 6 of the delightfully pink-hued “Rose of Virginia” by Charles Melton wines (dubbed by James Halliday and The Observer in UK, as the best rose in Australia) as well as a couple of stunning bottles from Kabminye Wines, created in a different style (think soft red berries, rose petals, musk and apple). Kabminye also gave rise to the purchase of a couple of very unusual white wines, not to mention the only shirz we walked away from the Barossa from – one that I couldn’t get Gordon to get his nose out of for ages while we were at the winery! Also unexpected was the purchase of an 11year old “voluptuous and decadently rich” cabernet sauvignon harvested from 150 year old vines – though I must confess we have already joyfully soaked our liver in this the other night when we sat down to a camp dinner of aromatic rosemary-lamb roast!

We will let the pictures tell the story of our foodie delights – we hope you enjoy them! Not represented though and worth a mention here, is the simple yet stunning regional platter we enjoyed at Peter Lehmann wines, as we basked in the warm sun and sat on the picnic lawns amongst palms and burly red gum trees that led they eye down to the river. Not liking their shiraz that was available for tasting, we instead sipped away on lightly oaked chardonnay as smoked mettwurst and cured pork loin went hand in hand with dill cucmbers, camembert coupled wonderfully with bright purple beetroot relish, a mature cheddar was offset by the most sensational pear chutney I have ever tasted (and yes, I have since acquired 2 jars of the stuff!) and freshly baked bread sat alongside Kalamata olives and local almonds. A simple plate that seemed to be made in heaven! Other memories that I will joyfully take with me to my grave, included the best bowl of custard I have ever eaten in my entire life and which, I doubt can ever be beaten anywhere else on this planet! Drowning the most delectable dried fruits poached in liqueur (a.k.a. “sticky”), it was a beautiful pale lemon and silky affair, flecked with real vanilla from top-notch pods and firm though not set – one spoonful seemed to fill your entire mouth and it was THAT good that it had to be eaten very slow so the magic wouldn’t end!.

Perhaps the thing I haven’t really stopped being excited about though, was our visit to Maggie Beer’s Farm Shop. For those of you in the UK, she is a celebrity gourmet cook here in Australia with her own TV show and huge cult following. Her mantra is “Seasonal produce, picked at its peak of ripeness…..It’s all about the flavour” and I love the attitude that has her quoting that she cooks “from the heart, unhampered by rules and dietary guidelines. Flavour has always been my force, gutsy, flavoursome, simple food”. Well I will toast to that! Maggie is also very famous for her products such as burnt fig jam (it’s yum!), her famous verjuice creation (unfermented grape juice), pheasant and quail products and her signature, real icecreams (with flavours such as passionfruit; burnt fig and honeycomb; quince and almond). In fact I never realized just how huge her product range was – from pastes, pates and chutneys to sauces, jams and oils and the “shop” was just like walking into a country pantry/kitchen meets stylish providore. Every single one of her products were for tasting – it was like a Willy Wonka factory for gourmet foodies and you could not wipe the smile off my face! As well as tastings, there was a brilliant cooking demo done by her daughter, with Maggie coming in and out every now and again from the filming of her TV series next door, to tantalize us with descriptions of what she had just cooked but that had got eaten up by the film crew! We had to console ourselves with scoffing the amazing nut butter pan-fried mushrooms finished off with verjucie (what am amazing taste sensation they were!) and the pea, mint and verjuice pate on crackers – ho hum! While Gordon was foodied-out and had to sit down for a coffee, I kept going, like the proverbial Duracell-bunny, busying myself with collecting all the stylish free recipe cards for creative ways to use her products (like adding dollops of the porcini mushroom and verjuice pate with dollops of ricotta to an omelette pan just 2 minutes before the end of cooking! Yumm I had never thought o use a mushroom pate in that way before!). I was so in love with the whole place I asked the cooking-demo lady if I could move in, then “when they were hiring?” I was told I needed to be passionate about great food – tick! That test passed, it was “send in your resume” – jeez, I wonder what they were looking for as credentials………my waist size and room for its growth????!!!

So there you have it folks – our adventures in Barossa are now over and if you needed me to conclude this blog with any further comment, I would simply re-direct you to the little ditty that you read at the beginning!