Thursday 9 July 2009
Highlights: Bushtucker Winery Tour

First a confession, I’m writing this with a hangover. Today I went on the ’Bushtucker Winery Tour’. We started at 10.30 am and I got dropped off around 6 pm, in between was a lot of drinking, singing and eating.

The full day saw use visit (in order) the following places:

• Bettenay Wine
• Chocolate Factory
• Margaret River Dairy Company (Cheese Factory)
• The Grove (Winery)
• The Liqueur Factory
• Knee Deep (Winery)
• Duckstein (Beer)

All up I tasted about 38 different wines, and when I say tasted I mean it, they taught us how to drink wine, how to hold the glass, smell it, hold the wine in our mouth and drink it. While not a big fan I did like the whites from The Grove, apparently they have won several awards.

In fact Margaret River area accounts for about 2% of Australian wines but 25% of the awards.’ Now the liqueurs were terrible, but hey, I don’t like coffee and they tasted like coffee. The beers were based on Munich beers which bought back memories of my misadventures in Munich in 2006. It was actually hard to finish the last beer; it had been a very long day by this point.

I should mention that the cheese and chocolate factory were first rate, the dark chocolate being especially good. For lunch we had an assortment of meats, breads and fruits and vegetables. One of the meats was kangaroo (not bad actually). Two lucky people got to have a rare WA witchetty grub. I didn’t volunteer for this job as I have tried one before (when I was young and naive).

At the end of the tour we headed back to town singing all kinds of songs, a few Australian themed songs (“I come from a land down under” rings a bell). In summary a great day if not for the headaches coming on. Hopefully the alcohol levels will drop enough to let me drive tomorrow 🙂  The cricket was good to watch again, Ponting and Katich both getting their centuries in the last 2 overs of the day.

BTW the overnight storms they are having are incredibly powerful. I’m hoping my red eye special on Friday night isn’t affected.