Adelaide, Barossa Valley and Kangaroo Island

[yflyer]

It’s official: Adelaide is now my favourite city to visit in Australia.

Sydney has the Harbour Bridge and Opera House, Melbourne is uniquely liveable in so many ways, and Perth almost feels crowded these days, but given carte blanche to choose a place in Australia to spend a few weeks on holiday, I would now pick Adelaide and its environs as first choice.

It is just such a different place from Singapore. It is the perfect antidote to the frenetic, congested, turbo-charged, adrenaline-laced lifestyle that people in Singapore seem to consider normal. If you are a Singaporean, spend a little time in Adelaide and your whole perspective on life may change. It doesn’t HAVE to be that way. At least not for a little while. Could I live there? Not sure, but at the end of the trip, I felt refreshed, recharged, restored.

Not your usual TR this time, but in order not to stray too far off topic, I will end off this TR with impressions of the Qantas Club in Adelaide Airport (Which is also the designated Oneworld Sapphire & Emerald Lounge), as well as my flights on Qantas from ADL-SYD on a very special QF 738, and SYD-SIN on QF5, operated by an A330, all in Y.



This TR, now complete, has somehow reached Peter Jackson-esque proportions...For readers who wish to cut to the chase and get straight on to the airport/aircraft segment of this TR, I invite you to jump ahead to post #38 here...

But before that, here is a whirlwind tour of Adelaide, the Barossa Valley, and Kangaroo Island....

[yflyer]

Adelaide is not a large city. It is neatly laid out in a grid, with a very walkable city centre, a long shopping street named Rundle Mall...



...and a busy central market where all manner of food, produce and groceries are on offer.



There is also a cricket stadium where “The Ashes” Cricket Test Series was taking place between Australia and England the week my family and I were there. More pictures of the Qantas 738 specially painted for these cricket matches coming up later in this TR.

Perhaps because of the cricket, hotel rates were far higher, and accommodation much more scarce, than one would expect for Adelaide.

The city itself is pretty, with a lot of greenery, open space, and a river winding through the northern edge of town.



A very charming city, both modern and a little retro.



A nice base to explore the surrounding regions, and that is where the real delights are to be found.

[yflyer]

At Cleland Wildlife Park, we saw a Kangaroo doing a convincing impression of the Qantas logo…



As well as a Tasmanian Devil, looking almost as cute as its Warner Bros Looney Tunes namesake.



Apparently you don’t need to leave the city to encounter wildlife, either.

[yflyer]

There is very good dining to be had.



We had lunch at Press*, which served a very eclectic selection of Western/Australian dishes.

Just a note of caution to eminere and other readers…don’t continue reading on an empty stomach









We ordered scallops…



Squid with chimichurri sauce…



Beef tartare (foreground), and a pork bun in the background…



And a mixed grill consisting of, clockwise from 12 o'clock, lambs’ brains (yikes!), sweetbreads, blood sausage, calves' tongue and minute steak, with a soft boiled egg in the middle…



A memorable meal indeed!

[yflyer]

After a couple of very pleasant days in Adelaide, we rented a Nissan X-Trail SUV from Hertz and headed to the Barossa Valley.

First stop was Maggie Beer’s Farm Shop, in the heart of the Barossa. Maggie Beer is a culinary legend in Australia, and we soon found out why.



At her farm shop, a wide selection of jams, quince, dips, pate and sauces were available for you to purchase and sample. There were open jars and dishes of almost everything, alongside disposable spoons and bread, for visitors to sample before buying.



There was also a café serving picnic fare, and cooking demonstrations. Not a very wide selection of food on sale, mainly pate, terrines, and picnic baskets with dips etc, as well as wine, beverages etc, but the terrine and pate we ordered tasted superb, much lighter and more refined than similar dishes elsewhere.

[yflyer]

The setting was very pleasant as well. You could sit inside or outside (if the weather was good, and it was the day we were there) to enjoy your meal.



I wonder why they don’t expand the restaurant menu to include more food items though. The place would be an even bigger hit as a restaurant if the selection were wider. But as mentioned, the picnic fare which was available was done to a very high standard, and was quite delicious.

[yflyer]

We then spent the next day or so tasting wines at various cellar doors at the vineyards in the Barossa, sampling a variety of both mainstream and boutique wineries.



A note to visitors, especially to Singaporean drivers: If you are renting a vehicle, get one with a GPS! The roads there, including unpaved gravel roads, are not straightforward to navigate along if one is used to city roads. With a GPS, it became a fairly straightforward exercise, even if the street numbers didn’t always exist.

Wherever we went, the scenery was never less than stunning.







One of our first stops was Penfolds, which had fairly large facilities for sampling (and purchasing wines).







We found that most wineries in the Barossa had a similar system for tasting: tasting of most wines was complimentary, and all had knowledgeable staff to pour and tell you about the wines you were tasting. A fairly long list of wines was available to taste, usually in a suggested order of tasting, starting with white wines, then lighter reds before moving to the heavy hitting Shiraz and Cabernets. What was also nice was the fact that many wineries had bottlings only available for purchase at the cellar door.

What we did find was that the larger, more commercial and mainstream wineries typically restricted the wines to be sampled to their low or mid-range selections, either not offering their top end wines, or offering their best wines for tasting only for a fee, whereas the smaller wineries had more modest selections, but had on offer even their more expensive bottlings available to taste.

[yflyer]

A good example of a boutique winery was Henschke, where the cellar door was a much more intimate and small room, where a very good selection of wines were available to taste.







I am not one to taste and spit…far from it. Perhaps that is how professionals do it, but I savoured every sip of the superb wines on offer. Thankfully my wife undertook driving duties that day, and ably drove us around in our rented Nissan X-Trail without so much as a wrong turn.

[Feb 2018 Update: One of the wines I tasted that day was the Keyneton Euphonium...a wine I would be reacquainted with in an SQ A380 Suite many years later...]

[yflyer]

One of my favourite mainstream wine labels is Yalumba – I’ve always been a fan of their wines, and their cellar door did not disappoint.





Set in beautiful grounds, their tasting room was spacious yet felt intimate and cosy, as if you were tasting wines in someone’s large living room, or the main lounge in a mountain lodge.



The wines I sampled were marvelous as well.

[yflyer]

Our next stop was Jacob’s Creek – that most commercial and pervasive of Australian wine producers. We did not intend to visit them, however we had mis-keyed our GPS and lost our way to one of our wineries of choice, and as we had found ourselves near Jacob’s Creek towards the end of the day, we decided to visit.

The scenery in that part of the Barossa was spectacular, vineyards set among rolling hills.







It was certainly the largest facility we visited, and the visitor centre was grand in a slightly cold, impersonal sort of way.



A reasonable selection of wines was on offer, and service was friendly and attentive, however compared to the smaller boutique wineries, it just felt a little commercial.



In any case, why visit Jacob’s Creek when their wines are available in practically every supermarket or bottle shop that you step into.

An undoubted success from a commercial standpoint, but I felt that a little of the romance of winemaking was absent there.

[yflyer]

And the contrast could not have been more stark when our last stop for the day was Torbreck, a “cult” winery if there ever was one, and one with a special link to Singapore through their relationship with the Les Amis restaurant, where one of their bottlings is even named “Les Amis”.

Torbreck, and their founder, Dave Powell, has been in the news recently for the wrong reasons: wrangling between the main investor and their original founder, however none of this was apparent in their small and intimate tasting room at their cellar door.



Here, a very wide selection of their wines, even their top bottlings, were available to taste.



A delectably long list of wines were available to taste, including some of their high end bottlings. Wines like Run Rig, which can retail for S$200 or more a bottle were poured for visitors to taste on a complimentary basis.

Now there’s real passion for your work, and a nice reward for visitors who take the trouble to travel there to visit.

[yflyer]

It was not all about wine. Food was superb too. Perhaps it is the freshness of the produce, but so many things tasted delicious in South Australia.

We visited 40’s Café, which won an award for best pizza maker in Australia.



The pizza’s did not disappoint. Everything was cooked to order, and if you ordered a large pizza, and could not decide on the toppings, you could split your pizza and choose a different topping for each half. A great idea!



We also stopped by the Barossa Valley Cheese Company, along a beautiful Jacaranda lined street in Angaston.

[yflyer]

We visited a well regarded bakery as well, Apex Bakery, to pick up various loaves of bread.



For someone used to bread from Gardenia and Delifrance, the delicate flavour and sheer deliciousness of the freshly baked loaves from Apex came as quite a shock. You could just eat these loaves plain, or with a dab of butter. What makes bread in South Australia so good?





We also ate fairly spectacular bacon and delicious sausages and eggs. Yes, even bacon and eggs taste better there!

[yflyer]

Then we left Barossa and headed to Kangaroo Island, via SeaLink Ferry.

Singapore is an island, so is Kangaroo Island. And that is where the similarities end...

For a start, it is Australia’s 3rd largest island, after Tasmania and Melville Island, and is 150km long and between 57-90km wide. In other words, Kangaroo island is about 7 times the size of Singapore!

I have to confess not having heard of Kangaroo Island before this trip to Adelaide. This place deserves to be better known. On the other hand, a lot of the beauty of Kangaroo Island stems from the fact that large swathes of the island are untouched by man, so perhaps it is best that it remains, to me, one of the great “stealth” vacation spots, at least to non-locals.



To be continued!

[eminere™]

There is very good dining to be had.

We had lunch at Press*, which served a very eclectic selection of Western/Australian dishes.

Just a note of caution to eminere and other readers…don’t continue reading on an empty stomach

I couldn't help myself!

Always enjoy reading your TRs.