We are hitting the Barossa Valley today on a wine tour.  All these years later after the Celebrity Silhouette disaster of taking forever to dock (because the captain had to move the ship 5 meters!!!) and not having time to go to the Barossa, we are finally going there!  And even better, we aren’t driving!  We have booked a van tour that is sort of like a hop on hop off bus tour – there is a set route and you can decide where you go and when.  You just have to make sure you follow the bus schedule.

Excellent choice!  We are in a little van, and there are only 8 of us on the tour today.  Not crowded.  Everyone is really nice.  And because there are so few of us, the driver/guide, Yvette, asks us each where we want to go, and basically schedules the whole tour around our all of us.  Perfect!

Yvette is awesome, personable, knowledgeable.  She talks the whole way there, giving us the history of the region and explaining the town names as we make the hour+ drive out to the valley.  The original settlers here were Prussian. One of the immigrants bought 30 acres of land, then convinced other Prussians to immigrate to work on the land.  He then sold the land to them, and ended up opening the first bank in all of Australia.  His name was Angas and one of the towns on the tour, Angaston is named after him.

Our first stop is Grant Burge, which we’ve read about and wanted to try, but also because our lovely hosts have given us a bottle of Grant Burge red, and we are hoping we can swap it for a white (thank you Ed for thinking of that!)  We took the tours advice to heart and have pre-booked every wine tasting to ensure we will be able to do them – the valley can get very crowded and tours get sold out easily.  Not a problem today, which is why we chose to come on a Monday and not over the weekend, we are the only people at the winery along with another 2 girls from the van tour.  The winery setting is beautiful, the tasting room overlooking a lovely pond in the distance, and the ground are filled with beautiful purple flowers.   The sommelier is adorable, she’s lived in Barossa all her life and tells us all about growing up there, and the background on Burge, who was an original settler here and started the Lutheran church.  The current winemaker is 5^th generation.

The wines are fabulous, we even liked the reds! And she swapped out the red for us, giving us a fabulous Pinot Gris, which I will now take onboard the ship with me.  Perfect.

After the tasting, we meandered around the grounds, taking pictures of the beautiful scenery, then hopped on the bus to our next stop – Angaston for lunch.

In Angaston, there are a whole bunch of options, but we were still in a pizza mood, so we went to the 40’s Café, which advertised the best pizza.  We were the first one’s there, and the girl at the counter was apparently too young to serve us alcohol, she said she didn’t have an “RST” number or something.  Oh well, we’ll figured we’d just have water with our pizza.  But then some older guy came out from the back, texted somebody and we had our drinks.  Who knows!  It was great though – the pizza was awesome – way, way to big, but every so tasty – and we had our beer and wine.  Now that’s a pour!

Our next stop was going to be another winery, but before we got there, we stopped at a taphouse and decided to just stay there.  That way Ed could have another beer and wouldn’t be forced to just drink wine all day.  Called Stein’s Taphouse B19, this was a typical pub – but with an excellent outdoors area where we sat and sipped our beverages.  Mismanagement beer for Ed (love the name!!!), a sour Berlinerweisse, and Yalumba Sauvignon Blanc for me.  Yalumba was one of the winery stops on the tour, so we didn’t miss anything since I’m drinking their wine here!  Win win.

Our last stop for the day is Maggie Beer’s Farm Shop, which we had no idea about, but turns out Maggie Beer is famous for being on a cooking show of some sort.  One of the girls on our tour is a total fan – she grew up watching Maggie Beer with her mom and this is the biggest deal for her. She is like a giggling teen, which is so sweet to watch.  We have an excellent tasting here, again with a lovely sommelier who was even more talkative than our Grant Burge lady, and gave us extra wine and apertif to drink.  We actually bought some coffee syrup liquor, that we had during the tasting, to take home to  use in our cooking. What the heck!

After our tasting we were wandering around the very pretty property, when Yvette came out and took us on a tour of the peacock cages.  There are a ton of peacocks here, they are so beautiful – and noisy!  But totally fun to look at and watch strut about their enclosures.

And with that, we are done, back in the van, going to pick up the last of our other tour folks and heading back into Adelaide.  An excellent day – well worth the wait!

Back in Adelaide, we really didn’t have any set plans for dinner, so we headed to Rundle Mall again, enjoying all the bronze statues of the pigs!  We headed to Woolies, one of the grocery stores there, just to amble around and see what was there.  They had whole roasted chickens!  So, you know, dinner on the balcony!  Perfect for our last night!  And perfect it was.  The food, the ambience, the company. 

And the sunset didn’t disappoint on this our last night in Adelaide.

What a fabulous time we’ve had here.  We could totally live here – it is just that kind of a wonderful place.  But it is too late for us to even entertain a move like that. Ah well.  We have other adventures and journeys to conquer.  Including the Grand Princess in the morning!