With a break for Christmas I thought it would only be right to see a bit of New South Wales. My first idea was to hire a car and see some of the state that way, but unfortunately I was thinking a bit too long and when I wanted to book a car there were none left. But not hampered in my first attempt I decided to book a tour instead, at least that meant I wouldn't have to drive and the tour I had decided on was a visit to the Hunter Valley where I would go to wine school and wine tasting, so driving there would not have been a good idea!

So the boutique wine tour bus picked me up from the bottom of my street at 7am on the Sunday morning, and I was preparing myself for the 2.5 hour drive up to the Hunter. The drive was actually quite good, the scenery was picturesque, the driver was very funny and I struck up conversation with a northern couple. Who it turned out were the only other ones, including me who had booked the gourmet lunch option, so we would be stuck with each other for the whole day.

Our first stop once arriving in the Hunter was to the wine school. Here we learnt all about wine, the techniques, the grapes, the grapes, the process of making the wine. After this I believed myself to be the younger, more attractive version of Gilly Goulden and was looking forward to tasting some wine and being able to pick up the "bodyshop aroma" and "peardrop flavours" in the wine.

So.....we arrive at our first winery, where we have a tasting menu of about 8 different wines and the the guy conducting the tasting goes on about how great they are, but he was Scottish so I didn't understand a bloody word. Anyway with a bit of swirling and fluffing the wine, you smell and taste. It smelt like wine and tasted like wine. After a few more they all smelt and tasted the same, I was good at picking up the difference between red and white wine and that was about as far as it got. At the end of the tasting there's an opportunity to buy any wines that you like. I didn't buy any!

Off to another winery before lunch and it was pretty much exactly the same as the previous wine, by this time everything tasted the same and I just wanted my lunch.

Lunch was good, and the northerners ended up being really good company and quite a laugh, and after we stuffed our faces (Tempus 2) and had a tasting there. We tried all 20 of the tasting wines on that menu.

Another two more wineries after lunch all much the same. I learnt that the Hunter Valley is famous for its Semillon and Verndelho. Verdelho wine is made from a Portugese grape, the Portugese use this grape for green wine and apparantly Australia is the only country that make this wine into a coiffing wine (that means it doesn't have to be accompanied by food to get the best from the wine) but this style of wine varied dramatically between the different wineries.

By the end of the day I was knackered and slightly worse for wear. In the wine school we were told what a spitoon was and that it isn't rude to use it. I didn't really care about rudeness I'd paid for the tour I was going to drink as much of the stuff as I could. My head wasn't really impressed with this so I slept the whole way back to Sydney and have worked out that it doesn't really like Semillon, so in future I'll stick to Sav Blanc.

But all in all a fantastic and informative day out and I mighjt even consider a tour of the Yarra Valley, they might specialised in Sav Blanc, take a look at the pictures they doi it more justice than this blog entry.