Aussie Stomping Grounds

Our friends thought my plan to visit Adelaide was foolhardy. For one thing, the distance from Melbourne to Adelaide is more than 450 miles -- about the same as Washington to Greenville, S.C., but without interstate highways.

More important, they said, urbane, cosmopolitan Australians consider Adelaide inferior to the international elegance of Sydney and the culinary diversity of Melbourne. It's a railway stop on the way to Alice Springs and the Outback, or Perth on the western edge of the continent. They insisted we could get our fill of vineyards near Melbourne.

I held out for Adelaide, and we were richly rewarded with some of the best wines we have ever tasted.

A Lesson in Aussie

We thought we were primed when we headed Down Under. We had spent a year getting ready, reading travel guides, consulting wine magazines and trying dozens of Australian wines. Twenty-four hours in Melbourne turned our heads upside down.

At lunch, on the way in from the airport, we didn't recognize a single Australian producer on the restaurant's large wine list. Ditto for lunch and dinner the next day. When we mentioned some of the wines we'd been drinking in the United States, the reaction of our hosts -- and their friends and relatives -- bordered on ridicule. Mostly cheap exports, they cried.

I explained how I'd been fascinated by Penfolds since 1995, when Wine Spectator magazine named its 1990 Grange the wine of the year -- the first time the magazine had given such an accolade to a wine not French or American. Our friends sighed. It may be the country's best-known wine, they said, but the way it's made -- from a blend of grapes plucked from the best grown by myriad small producers -- flies in the face of the more traditional "taste of the earth" approach of boutique winemakers.

By the time we hit the road two days later, headed toward the Rutherglen wine region of northeastern Victoria about three hours away, we were remapping our plans and furiously cross-matching dozens of small wineries we had never heard of with the top-rated wines in the latest Penguin Good Australian Wine Guide. Even with a designated driver (usually Bill), we tried to limit visits each day to six or eight wineries, stopping just long enough to taste a representative sample of their wares, but leaving enough time to enjoy the sights along the way.

The first outing, for example, was by way of Glenrowan, the little town where Australia's most famous outlaw, Ned Kelly, was hunted down and captured in 1880.

Never heard of Kelly? He is Australia's biggest folk hero, kind of a combination Jesse James and Robin Hood. And Glenrowan is home to a strange little museum dedicated to the Australian equivalent of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Part stage set, part rudimentary robotic animation, all the proprietor's obsession with the Kelly tale (his grandfather made the crude metal bulletproof helmet for which Kelly was famous), it was a fitting introduction to Australian lore.

Back on the road, we tried to nail down Australian lingo. "Pokies" are electronic slot machines, a rage sweeping the continent -- to which wine-producing regions seem particularly averse. "No Pokies" signs abound.

We learned that "cellar door" is the Aussie (there is a national insistence on shortening every word and adding "ie") term for what we Americans call a tasting room. The wineries started out selling their products literally out the door of the cellar, and most of them still do; some sell all their wine that way. Not only are the prices better for consumers, but Australian postal rates for shipping wines are incredibly low -- about $14 U.S. to ship a case of wine from one end of the country to another. (It costs about $250 per case to ship to the United States.) Most vineyards are along the perimeter of the continent -- where most Australians live -- and visiting vineyards is a national pastime.

These days visitors are allowed inside the wineries -- into often spare, sometimes luxurious accommodations -- where the person doing the pouring is just as likely to be the vineyard owner or the winemaker or at least members of their families.