Enough chasing about in the baking heat for furry critters and driving hundreds of kilometres through scorched desert in search of wilderness adventure. Let’s drink some wine and have a huge lunch!
We chose the Swan Valley wine region for today’s diversion, as it’s scarcely an hour from Fremantle. I can report one genuinely good wine from the fifteen sampled – a Sauvignon Blanc Semillon made by Garbin winery that had somehow caught a lot more rich complexity than I usually find in a SBS (as the winemaker neatly abbreviated it). We tried three wineries, and each was very different in character. The chap at Lamont was the most entertaining: a huge bluff Aussie bloke with a belligerent wit, I couldn’t decide whether he was being a deliberate caricature.
Skip the next paragraph if wine bores bore you. ; )
Anyway, lunch was good and big. Food portions here are always big, they’ve really caught the American disease. However, they’re finding good ways around it, offering sharing plates or offering dishes as “Main or Entrée” so that you can have an entrée as your main course and thus get a plate you might almost be able to finish. It was a good day at a relaxed pace, and we dropped mum and dad off at the Comfort Inn this evening; they fly to New Zealand tomorrow while we have ten more days to explore the forests and coasts of the south-west of Australia.
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Blue Nun is of course Muller-thurgau, at least in it’s classic 70s form! Hopefully you’ll find some more interesting winemakers further down south. Leeuwin Estate wine and around there.
We’ll see! There’s not much daily budget left after finding a motel room and filling the car with fuel – it might be a choice between dinner or wine. Anyway, good show of wine erudition there – wish I’d known that as a retort to the big Aussie bloke.