Wine Tasting: Hunter Valley: Australia

Today we went to Hunter Valley, two hours drive from the suburbs of Sydney. At the rest stop I bought a hand knitted woollie hat for my friend’s two feet long sorta new born baby, and looked at Gollywogs, not very PC still found in Australia -didn’t know if you’re allowed to buy things like that nowadays. Australia is the land of big skies, never ending forests, and sudden bursts of bright blue water, may it be an inlet, a lake, artificial or real, or some unidentified bed of water. It goes too fast for you to take a photo, but anywhere else it would seem that the view would be made a big deal of. This is wild country, just very close to a city, kind of a breathless casual beauty, its there, look at it if you want, otherwise there are more just around the corner.

Today mom, dad and me are wine tasting. I don’t know much about wine except I drink it, and if it’s bad, I will get a headache. I know that I prefer Merlot over anything else, red over white and dessert wines are my favorite. I know the names mean some sort of grape, the place it’s created is oh-so-important and there are good years and bad years. I also know that for a cup of red stuff there are a million tastes that can spawn descriptions from sweaty leather, to bouquet of roses, to fruity and dry, chocolate to pine.

First we have an outdoor cafe lunch, you know the kind with big white umbrellas, waiters in black outfits and white aprons, ivy growing on the side just to pretend there is privacy but really it’s all open so anyone walking pass can see who is eating inside, the plates are 4 times the size of the food and also white to off set the colors of the red peppers and green salad, the brown sauce, that is all piled up one above the other, in an aesthetic pleasing way. If there is one thing to be said for this country it’s these hyper-sophisticated modern Australian cuisine with the freshest ingredients straight out of a spread from Marie Claire Magazine. Places like this are geared for tourists and wedding parties, young couples and their friends, and the occasional visiting family member such as myself.

To juxtaposition this artificially cool environment, with all it’s hand crafts, thousands of dollars worth of antique jewelry and art galleries, plus the never ending vines with rose bushes in the front is the real city of the part of town, where the residents live. 1920s wooden houses with porches, old men and women sit with leather skin and white hair in slippers, having been there since the part of town was a coal mining place, next to newer renovated houses bought by young couples who have moved there to participate in the wine country, while others so neglected it must be owned by the village alcoholic. The main street boasts four second hand stores, tea shops that sell sweet cake, and one “leisure” shop of camping equipment which I dubbed the “friendly neighborhood neo-Nazi store” for right on the door is a skull wearing a world war two helmet with the words, “Metal Ma-li-sha” emboldened above.

And whether the camping skin heads like it or not. I hold the tourist dollar and so does the thousand of people who come to this out of the way piece of land that without alcohol would have been left ghost from a time when the coal ran out. And so the rest of us go out and devour fresh cherry liqueur covered chocolate along with my caramels mix with blueberry bomb, and they sulk in their basements and feel angry.

The first winery has a list with a chart of ticks and medals. Confusing for me as I am not versed in details, but I drink anyway. The second had an art gallery attached; I was very enamored by the carburetor fly, the engine stork, and other pieces of industrial waste animals. The boutique wines are sweeter, lighter, fruiter and of lesser “quality” which is fine with me, I am still stuck in the kiddie drinks and not graduated and probably never will to the extra dry connoisseur wines. The third was a giant low lit supermarket of cheese tasting, wine tasting, and dips tasting. Bits of bread was flying, grouchy servers, and bottles of vinaigrette-olive-oil-plus-exotic-ingredient-to-give-asian-name to go with biscuits which have unpronounceable Italian names, where you put one of four kinds of soft cheeses, two brie and two vinds, plus cheddar and blue. Then miraculously, somewhere between the first bottle to the vine ash brie I could taste the difference and know the shiraz, merlot and whatever reds they have their were “shallow” and not “full enough” and that it was time to move on. After that, instead of having wines, I decided to stop by the tea shop and pick out one of 15 different kinds of fudge, $4 per 100 grams, macadamia vanilla, jaffa orange, rocky road, chocolate ginger, mint chocolate, coconut ice, virgin white, and hop into the car and fall asleep around sunset, luckily the parents were driving.