Western Australia. Day 4. 7:00am. We arrive at Gracetown – one of the most popular swimming beaches in the Margaret River Region. And. It’s. Completely. Ours. !!!!!
Not a soul in sight. What a way to start the day off! Why were we up so early? It’s because we wanted to get in a little swim before our big wine tour day. At 9:30 we were picked up by the Lonely Planet-recommended tour guide: Wine for Dudes!
That’s seriously what it’s called. Why would I make that up? And you know what that means? Karen was a dude for a day... hahaha!
The Margaret River Region is home to only 3% of Australia’s wine production, but a whopping 25% of Australia’s premium wine production. Who determines what is premium and what is not remains a mystery to me, but I think that would be a totally rockin’ job to have. I wish I could get paid to determine which burritos were premium and which ones were rubbish.
The first winery was fantastic. They had pretty mosaics out front and Karen got to sit in a throne. One of the ladies who works there is actually currently on a popular Australian reality TV show called “The Farmer Wants A Wife” – which is basically like “The Bachelor” except they get men from rural Australia to date city women who wouldn’t mind marrying a hick and moving to a farm (our winemaker was the first lady to be a contestant with 8 city men to choose from). Their wine was superb – even the reds, which I normally don’t like – and I walked away with a delicious bottle of Chenin Blanc.
I refrained from purchasing more than one bottle, but had I known the remaining wineries weren’t going to be as good, I would’ve purchased a bit more. Wine wasn’t the only thing in the cards for the day. As with any good wine tour, there was of course a stop at a chocolate factory. I purchased. We ate it that night.
And there was a stop at an olive oil factory. They had the most delicious macadamia pesto tapenade. And by most delicious, I mean it was boneriffic. I purchased. We ate it that night.
We stopped at another winery called Hay Shed Hill (which I thought was called “Haitian Hill” until I saw it in writing) and we got to do a little wine mixing on top of our wine tasting. We had a Cabernet and Shiraz and got to mix them together in different proportions to see how the flavours changed. It was sort of like high school chemistry class except drinking the liquids here didn’t burn any holes through anyone’s esophagus.
Along the way we also picked up a solo British backpacker named Dean. He was tragically heterosexual but we adopted him as one of our own anyway and brought him back to our cottage for dinner. But before we cooked, we decided it would be fun to play around a little in the vineyards behind our cottage.
And then Cade, Dean, and Karen cooked us dinner.
And I took pictures.
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