Margaret River Revisited - Missed Post

It's accepted that most visitors to Margaret River will, at some point, visit a vineyard, or winery as they are called here. As I am currently the sole driver I wasn't really looking forward to this. What's the point if you can't enjoy the wine once you get there? The obvious alternative is an organised day tour but, here again, I was less than certain. Why spend a day tasting wines when you can probably only differentiate the first half dozen or so? Harvest Tours provided what seemed like a sensible alternative, part wine tour part food tour.

10.00am seemed indecently early to be sampling our first 8 wines, but we were keen to not to appear as lightweights to our fellow travellers. We were joined by Jane, a fellow Brit, Marie from Brizzie and Sarah, a party girl from Melbourne. All were gung ho and good fun. Adinfern Winery seemed not in the least put out to be serving Cab Sav, Shiraz Cab & Merl Shiraz at this hour and we were soon feeling mellow, despite spitting out most of the samples.

As the sampling continued at the next winery, reserve began to dissipate and we were soon comparing spitting techniques (mine was lousy, more a half-hearted dribble than a fully-committed projection) and sampling notes. We were closely followed by a large tour of thirty or so youngsters which led to the memorable comment from Marie that, had she been part of such a group she’d have felt like “A shag on a rock”! She couldn’t quite understand why Fo, Jane and I were collapsed in hysterics when all she meant was “out of place”. By lunchtime, when our ever-patient host Jamie poured us into the upmarket Cullen Estate, we were all pretty rowdy and probably no worse than the boozy louts we'd all sought to avoid by joining this small tour.

We tasted our way through another 8 or so wines before finally getting to the lunch we so desperately needed. After lunch we started to hit the food emporia and this is where our taste buds really started to take a pounding. At one establishment, Providore, we worked our way through 7 wines, 4 chocolate liqueurs, 16 different jams and around 35 assorted oils, chutneys, vinegars and sauces.

At Gabriel's we sampled 6 or so single - country chocolate varieties and at Javava, three different coffees as well as more chocolate liqueurs. It was all fabulous, but ultimately frustrating because, from about 12.30, I'd been in a state of sensory overload and incapable of differentiating one taste from another.

Sarah, the flight attendant from Melbourne, was a great morale officer however and, being 30 years younger than most of us, kept us going more or less forward as we started to flag.

By the end of the day we had accumulated a case of wine, three bars of chocolate, a bottle of passion fruit vinegar, a pot of tapenade and some rhubarb jam. A good haul but I was totally wasted. Not drunk by any means but simply unable and unwilling to think about wine or food ever again; well, until breakfast anyway. On the way back to base Jamie had laid on a kangaroo sighting, it was a mother with a joey looking out of the pouch and she was simply standing in the road. Beautiful, but not too bright.

For those who are interested, my rash has now cleared completely. A doctor here in Margaret River assessed the results of my earlier blood test and came to the conclusion that the rash was not an allergic reaction. Instead he claimed it was a side effect of my BP medication. So, tomorrow, I shall lower the dose and see how it goes. Tomorrow we head back north to Busselton.