Aussie Stomping Grounds

Pasties and Penguins

Since Bill and Alma had visited Rutherglen several times, they took us to their favorite, All Saints Estate, as an elegant introduction to the wine country. This is one of the region's original wineries, now owned by members of the Brown family, a founding dynasty of Australian winemaking. All Saints is housed in a castle, with lofty brick walls and hedges that resemble a moat. It's an aristocratic site that wouldn't be out of place in the Bordeaux area of France or along Highway 29, the main drag of California's Napa Valley. On the edge of the Australian bush, it appeared like an apparition.

The cellar door is a cavernous room, with a huge tearoom and restaurant in an adjoining conservatory. We were greeted like long-lost cousins. All Saints produces a staggering array of wines, including shiraz, cabernet sauvignon, chardonnay, Riesling, sparkling and fortified wines by the dozen. And we were welcome to sample as many as we wanted, without charge. We focused on the durif, a robust red that often has been mislabeled petite syrah in the United States. When we were finished sampling it and a half-dozen others, we tried out the breathalyzer by the front door as we left, a contraption that is a regular feature of Australia's wine-tasting circuit, an indication of the country's tough drunk-driving laws.

Back on the two-lane blacktop that serves as the main highway through town, we ducked down a rutted dirt road and stopped at a ramshackle shed that is home to some of the finest sweet wines in Australia. The old farmhand dressed in dusty work clothes and tending to a dog tied up outside turned out to be William "Sir Bill" Chambers, the owner of Chambers Rosewood Vineyard, who was awarded Australia's highest honor, the Medal of the Order of Australia, for his contributions to the nation's wine industry.

Chambers is the king of what Australians call "stickies," the fortified sweet wines most often served with desserts. Sample bottles were sitting out on a table, and we were invited to pour our own as Chambers, a fifth-generation winemaker in his early seventies, brushed aside compliments. "We just do it the way we always have," he said. To hear him tell it, anyone could plant some vines and turn out world-class wines. It was not unlike having the owner of France's famed Chateau d'Yquem talk you through a tasting.

The next morning we learned firsthand about another mainstay of Australian road trips: the bakery. A vestige of settlers' European roots, there are bakeries in every town and they serve as kind of bush country McDonald's. The bakeries aren't just all pastries and cakes but full-scale eateries serving sandwiches and pasties (meat turnovers) and a few hot meals such as shepherd's pie. The little town of Beechworth is home to one of the area's most famous, the Beechworth Bakery, a two-story place where tour buses schedule lunch. Over scones and coffee, we plotted our way through the Alpine and Yarra valley wine regions.

For the next week, we explored the wineries of Victoria, along the way sampling the artisan cheeses of Milawa and Red Hill, and dining in the sumptuous hall of Chateau Yering (Australia's only Relais and Chateaux hotel) and in the breezy elegance of Red Hill Estate, with sweeping views across the vineyards to the waters of Western Port and the Southern Ocean.

We spent an evening watching the nightly parade of fairy penguins on Phillip Island. These pint-size versions of the Antarctic penguin spend all day in the ocean and with great punctuality return each night at sundown to their burrows in the dunes. There are concrete grandstands to accommodate the crowds, and a boardwalk through the dunes so you can see the young waddling outside the burrows awaiting their parents' return with food. We explored nature parks and saw wombat, wallabies and kangaroos. In the wild, these animals are mainly nocturnal, and the only other kangaroos we saw were roadkill. We traveled along the Great Ocean Road southwest of Melbourne, which rivals French Riviera cornices, and saw the 12 Apostles -- amazing rock formations created by years of erosion.

Drink Up, Adelaide

When Gene and I ventured off alone to Adelaide, we asked for winery suggestions from every waiter and bartender we met, and they were always eager to offer their favorites, frequently places not listed in any of our books. A waiter at Jolley's Boathouse there recommended Rockford Wines, a tiny Barossa Valley winery that produces stellar wines using antique equipment and only sells at the cellar door. The owner of Adelaide's Universal Wine Bar, John Taylor, said, "Try some of this" as he poured us glasses of Tapestry shiraz. He suggested we visit this producer of such wines as Twelve Barrels, of which literally only 12 barrels were made.

He, too, suggested Rockford: "Your California stuff is nothing to sniff at, and God knows the French make luscious wines, but to my taste there is nothing like a deep, rich, red Barossa."

We set aside a day each to visit four separate wine regions surrounding Adelaide: Barossa, McLaren Vale, Adelaide Hills and Clare Valley. And we collected winemaking tales along the way. The cellar door manager at Wirra Wirra (an aboriginal name) directed us to Foggo Wines, a family-owned place that has some of the oldest cabernet sauvignons in Australia. There, owner Sandie Van De Wiel explained that some of their wines are produced in such small quantities that her children stomp the grapes. "Our wines are dry-grown, which means we don't irrigate and depend on moisture from the sea breezes to help temper the brutal summer temperatures," she said, noting that several years of recent drought had not changed their methods.

She and her husband, Herb, are second-generation wine producers. "He does it all by instinct," Van De Wiel said of her husband. "We have a university-trained winemaker who runs the numbers," determining things such as acidity.

On the day we visited Clare Valley, about an hour and a half north of Adelaide, there were dust storms so bad you could hardly see across the road. The winemakers apologized for the weather. But the storms didn't stop the revelry at Skillogalee Wines (named after the porridge of grass seed and water that sustained early settlers in the area), where a wedding party gathered on the veranda. And they didn't deter visitors to Sevenhill Cellars, where Jesuits make wine for churches throughout Australia (the giant barriques were labeled "sweet altar wine") and other varietals for public consumption.