Melbourne - Yarra Valley Wine Tour

PROST!

Although I have already done a wine tasting tour in Australia (in the Barossa Valley Wine Tour near Adelaide) I thought it would be great to compare that fantastic experience with some wineries from the Yarra Valley near Melbourne. As life is too short for bad wine I didn’t decide on the cheapest wine tour and went with the recommendation of Carly to do the daily public wine tasting tour with the Australian Wine Tour company. What I especially like about these wine tours is the fact that they don’t start before 9am :-)

So I got picked up at 9:30am on Sunday morning in front of the St. Paul’s Cathedral (opposite Federation Square) together with three other people. After one hour of driving around the CBD (Central Business District) and North Melbourne we had 16 people plus John our tour guide onboard and headed for the Yarra Valley.  One hour and nearly 40 km East of the city we arrived in the Yarra Valley where John told us more about the history of the wineries and how three Scots men from Sydney started the whole grape growing and wine production business just a few years after the city of Melbourne has been founded. It was very cloudy, cold and it drippled every so often during the day. Luckily wine tasting is an indoor sport :-)

 

Our first stop at 11am was the Yering Wine farm where John himself gave us a lesson in how to judge wine by its color and taste by using different parts of your mouth to taste the platter. He teaches this kind of wine tasting at some colleges around Melbourne.

 

After that one of the employees of Yering Wine gave us three more wines to taste, a white wine, a red wine and a sparkling Shiraz. Then we headed into the main tasting room to choose some more wines from a list. I choose mainly sweet and sparkling wines.

 

At 12pm we arrived at the Balgownie Estate winery for some more wine tasting where Jordan gave us four different wines which were all really nice.

 

Then we had lunch. This time (in contrast to the tour in the Barossa Valley) I could choose one out of four main courses and I got Grilled Barramundi (a fish). It tasted really good and we had tea/coffee afterwards. As there were some Ferraris on display outside the winery we got some nice pictures there as well before we drove off to the next winery.

 

This time it was a rather small winery in a rusty shed. We were able to try different wines from the table and again I went mainly for the sweet wines which tasted really good. Especially the Pink Lady Cider was nice and quite a few of the passengers bought six bottles of that. By then I was feeling really tipsy despite eating muesli bars and drinking lots of water in between.

 

At 2:15pm we arrived at our fourth and last winery of Chandon where we first had a look at the wine production machinery before we got into the air-conditioned cellar to choose one of the sparkling wines. I got the middle-sweet wine which the lady described as Christmas Sweet. I had to try it! It was alright. While I drank a full glass of it I spoke to the British family and two Japanese girls and two girls from Melbourne. It is so easy to connect with people on such a tour when you are there alone, especially after a few wines ;-)

 

In the bar we tried a few more wines before we took some pictures outside in front of the vineyard where you are not allowed to go through to protect the grapes from any pest. There I spoke to another couple from Queensland who found it very sad that I couldn’t find a job as an engineer in Melbourne and recommended trying my luck in New Zealand. Well…

 

At 3pm we climbed the bus a last time to head back to the city of Melbourne. Our bellies and heads full with lots of wine some of us fell asleep on the one-hour journey. And again I had to say Good-Bye to people who I would have loved to get to know better. I went grocery shopping and then back to Carly’s for dinner.

Yours Yarra-Valley-wine-tasting Stefanie