Australia has some very famous wine regions. Names like Hunter Valley in New South Wales, Margaret's River in Western Australia and, of course, Barossa Valley in South Australia. Where we were heading! What a way to spend a Sunday afternoon! Tasting wine in some of Australia's famous cellars! Fantastic! Not to get stuck into a bottle of wine or three would be criminal! After all, we are actually doing some serious R & D here......seriously, we are hard at work too, you know!

How is this for dedication? Since the reputation of Australia's police is fearsome when it comes to enforcing drink driving (since our time on the road we (Ed: always when Sands has been driving???) had been randomly breath tested three times already inside a week) and it only takes about 100ml of wine to put you over the limit. Plus, it is no fun when only one of you is doing the drinking....opps....tasting! So we decided to walk from one estate to the other. How about that for dedication (or desperation?)? Add in the fact that we would be walking in the heat of an Aussie summer and we knew we would deserve all the glasses we could muster!

In South Africa, you tend to pay per tastings. It is not usual to pay an amount and choose either 5 or 7 wines to taste from the cellar's selection. As a result, you tend to choose carefully and be a little frugal with your palette. But not in Oz! Here you pitch up and taste wines from white to red and from light to heavy - for FREE. Bliss!

Each wine estate does something slightly different from the other, so each visit adds something to the enjoyment of the cultural experience. At one estate, we tried sparkling shiraz! Come again, you say? A red heavy bodied, spicy on the palette wine that is now sparkling? The stuff of heathens and non-believers scream the purists. But since we are of the we-will-try-it-and-see-whether-we-like-it variety of wine consumer, this type of stereotyping does not bother us at all! My uneducated palette seems to like it a lot!

If you are a wine buff, you know that riesling is very much a sweeter wine. Perhaps a few notches down from a dessert wine, right? In Europe, the rieslings are renowned for being a sweet wine, but not so in Australia. Here, the rieslings are a very light bodied wine; light on the tongue with a subtle favours that tickle the tongue as it slides down on a hot summer's afternoon. Sauv Blancs and Chardonnays are far drier and heavier than the Aussie rielsings. With the heat, rows and rows of vines, the limitless blue skies and a bottle of this stuff was what was missing from the patch of cool green grass just outside. We all agreed that this would be a very very pleasant way to spend an afternoon. But....but....there were more estates to plunder......sorry.....go taste at!

Penfolds, Jacob's Creek and Wolfgang Blass are some of the most famous names that come out of the Barossa Valley winemaking community. But there are in fact 120 estates here and 500 wine making families that trace their lineage back to immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe (in Aussie terms, tracing lineage means going back in time and finding out what your great- or great-great grandfather did and where he was from. Australia, in European terms is still a very young country). But it was heartening to hear that the head of Penfolds was known to have a cube of ice in his red wine to cool it down (but you have to bear in mind that this is a South Australia in the summer and not a European winter!)(Incidentally, he was also known to be fond of a beer or two! Apparently Fosters actually owns most of the wine farms in this region anyway).

What many wine buffs don't realise, unless they have made the pilgrimage to Barossa Valley (of course, darling!), is that the Barossa Valley is only one of three valleys in the region that produce wines for the world; the other two being the Clare and Eden Valleys. One estate had us (they REALLY had to twist our rubber arms on a MONDAY morning to try these wines...shame on us wine-loving junkies!) try their new range of Shiraz wines. What they had done was produce wine from the three different valleys where all the variables that affect the wine were controlled as much as possible. The only significant variable that they could not alter was the soil type and chemistry (the valleys here are not separated by vast mountains as in South Africa, say between Franschoek and Stellenbosch and Hermanus, but rather by a low range of hills. The weather, and climate, is for all practical purposes, the same in each valley. Having said that, the terrain and topography of this region is somewhat disappointing if you have experienced the dramatic backdrops and landscape of the vineyards of the Western Cape, South Africa).

So trying three shiraz wines where only the soil type was different was fantastic. Although they were the same wine cultivar with similar characteristics, they were certainly three distinct and separate wines! If you ever come across Chateau Tanunda's Three Valley Shiraz range, you should try them for yourself! It is well worth it! Such is Australia's European cultural mix that the lady who served us had a strong Swizz accent but with an overlying twang! Strange but true!

One estate we went to was also the Jesuits' estate they established to make sacramental wine called Seven Hills (and perhaps cultivate a sense of humour too). What makes this estate more remarkable is that there is a community church right next to the vineyard, complete with shrine! But we both had a chuckle when we saw a sign for the door to the chapel that remarked that you should close the door to prevent birds from entering (Birds is a term used for sheilas in Oz, sometimes!)! (Actually we do get out and about, but sometimes isolation does funny things to your sense of humour and, by the way, it was actually quite funny at the time!

So with our newly purchased bottle in hand we headed out the Valleys and out to the bush and beyond!