6 May 2016 Much better! More wine! Good wine! The countryside around Paso Robles is beautiful, rolling green hills and sun-dappled wooded valleys, scattered with vineyards becoming vivid green as the vines grow into the summer. It’s exactly what wine country ought to look like. My favourite winery was the one I thought I’d like » » »
Posts Tagged ‘wine’
4 June 2016
Townsend’s long-eared bat attack
5 May 2016 So naturally we had a fairly easy start today. For us, that meant leaving the motel around 9ish. It was a perfectly decent motel, by the way, nothing at all special but nothing wrong; the Hollister Inn. Just in case you ever find yourself in Hollister, California. Which you won’t. We stopped » » »
21 May 2016
Wine day
24 April 2016 Today was definitely wine day. No new mammals today, just us as drunk as skunks. Well, we visited five different wineries and tasted more than thirty different wines! Actually, it’s not as bad as it sounds. In California you pay for a wine tasting ($10 is usual for a small winery, but » » »
Tags: wine
16 March 2015
Madeira Madeira
14th February 2015 So I just realised that I haven’t said anything about Madeira! The wine, not the island. And probably the original inspiration for coming here. For those who don’t know, Madeira is a style of fortified wine (so: related to sherry and port) only produced on the island of Madeira. It became very » » »
6 November 2012
Wine tour de France
It wasn’t planned that way, but we certainly ended up touring our way through a handful of France’s well known wine regions (as well as a short detour into Switzerland). Here’s a scattering of photos from the trip. Related Images:
5 November 2012
Full circle, full glass
2nd November 2012 Remember that bottle of special Vendanges Tardive wine that got broke back in the Switzerland episode? Well, I’ve got another one. Yes, Alsace was a bit of a detour on our way back to Calais but where’s the point of a completely unplanned holiday if you can’t change your itinerary on a » » »
5 November 2012
Rain again, again
1st November 2012 It’s raining again. Possibly France is trying to get rid of us. That’s okay, that just means more wine tasting. I’m not sure I’m entirely the best qualified wine taster right now, having a stinking cold with a blocked nose and a foul taste in the back of my throat that won’t » » »
5 November 2012
Rain again
31st October 2012 Arles is as far south as we go. It’s raining. It was raining first thing in the morning when we wandered the town to admire the Roman amphitheatre and find breakfast. We enjoyed pastries in a colourful patisserie with a cheeky and cheerful patissier. Then we squelched back to the car. We » » »
5 November 2012
Two different days
23rd October 2012 Well, I love Alsace. This is how wine tasting is done. You start in Obernai, near Strasbourg, and you meander along a winding road through vineyards of autumn gold, in the lee of the misty, wooded Vosges, passing through a series of medieval villages and towns of ever-increasing picturesqueness until you reach » » »
5 November 2012
Overdidit Sunday
21st October 2012 It has to be said, Épernay is essentially a crummy town. In England it would be Bracknell, or Basildon. It’s surprising really, you would think that the very heart of Champagne country would be an immense tourist draw with plenty of facilities for oodles of international visitors. Mais non. It’s a bland » » »
5 November 2012
The Marne valley
20th October 2012 Today we hopped in the car and toured around the vineyards of the Marne Valley, all turning yellow and amber in the late October sun. We stopped off for some tastings, our favourite being M. Alain Suisse at his tiny one-man independent champagne house in the village of Cumières. Although he spoke » » »
15 May 2011
Wine sans wombat
10th May 2011 Well, we didn’t see the dratted Hairy-nosed Wombat this morning either. It’s one of those cases where reality and expectation clash. Before we went to the Flinders we were under the impression that the Yellow-footed Rock-wallah was rare and hard to find, so we were delighted to spot two in the evening » » »
9 May 2011
Sealion blues
5th May 2011 We weren’t sorry to leave Flinders Chase Farm, not only freezing cold but home to rather over-familiar mice. One visited me in the bathroom, and another scampered onto the kitchen hob to see what we were cooking. The other special mammal species on Kangaroo Island is the Australian Sealion, this being the » » »
1 May 2011
Bitty day
30th April 2011 So, haha. We went to the Park Info Centre for the Grampians and the nice lady there gave us a photocopied list of all the mammals found anywhere in the park, told us that she had no clue where or when to be looking (“they could be anywhere, but I wouldn’t know”) » » »
24 April 2011
www.Tasmania
21st April 2011 Tonight we’re back where we started, at the Giant’s Table near Mount Field NP; the place where we had a cosy plank-floored cabin with a wood-burning stove and no platypus in the garden. At dusk this time we did see a platypus, but our cabin was less cosy, with carpets and no » » »
16 April 2011
Wine and wallaby
13th April 2011 Rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain. It finally gave up raining once we’d settled into our accommodation at about five in the evening. Hilariously, a guy at one of » » »
4 April 2011
Trek, plonk and splash
The Marlborough Sounds area stands a very good chance of being my favourite bit of New Zealand. We had a magical trek along the Queen Charlotte Track, saw wonderful wildlife in Queen Charlotte Sound, and had very contrasting indulgence in the Marlborough wine country of Wairau valley. Related Images:
30 March 2011
Not swimming with dolphins, Part 2
27th March 2011 Oh dear. So it seems that we are doomed not to swim with dolphins. Maureen fears it may be her foot odour scaring them off*, but as far as I’m aware smell doesn’t work underwater. We went out onto Queen Charlotte’s Sound, a beautiful waterway with hundreds of bays and inlets surrounded » » »
27 March 2011
Saved by the wine
New Zealand, Travelling light updates
26th March 2011, Picton Today began rainy and continued rainy, so I’m glad we decided to arrange our trek on the Queen Charlotte Track for a couple of days time to give the weather chance to clear. Who am I kidding. We’ll see. Anyway, we decided to spend today visiting the Saturday market in Nelson » » »
13 March 2011
Walking and drinking
13th March 2011 Normally I’d tut severely at someone using a single-malt scotch for something as whimsical as a cocktail, but Laphroig is such a rampant and unashamed peat monster that it doesn’t feel much of a sin to try and play with it. The cocktail involved stirring in marachino liqueur and vermouth, and it » » »
26 February 2011
Wine break
26th February 2011 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 » » »
28 August 2010
Cape Town and around
Very belated (we left Cape Town two weeks ago), here are photos from our week around Cape Town and the Cape Peninsula. Related Images:
12 August 2010
Hiking and wine tasting
Today we hiked up Table Mountain, via the Platterklip Gorge route which goes straight up the Cape Town face of it. I guess it underscores our “outdoorsy” nature that we much preferred the knackering hike up to the cablecar trip down with 40 other people. Cape Town is described as a beautiful city, but these » » »
8 August 2010
Flowers
I must be a softy, because wading through meadows carpeted in myriad flowers is one of my favourite things so far. It’s hard to do justice to the display in photos, but we took hundreds (but only ten made the gallery!). Namaqua is an arid region, baked to bare sand in the summer but exploding » » »