Wine-tasting in Adelaide

Pics courtesy: Rohit Mahajan of Outlook

Every once in a way, in the middle of a hectic work trip, you need a bit of time off. Time where you take off on a little trek to see or do something that you haven't seen or done before. Such it was today, when the South Australia Cricket Association plotted a little trip for us journos to the wine-production area on the outskirts of Adelaide.

South Australian wine is famous across the world...and we got a taste of why that's so during our trip today.

It was blazing hot. Blazing, blazing hot. Hotter than an afternoon in the peak of Delhi's summer. But that's part of the reason why the wine is as good as it is.

The destination was the Grant Burge Winery in the Barossa Wines Area, which also houses the Jacob's Creek variety, which is so popular in India. We saw both green grapes and purple grapes - which lead to the wines being white and red respectively, though white wine can be made from either variety because the wine is made from the pulp, and when you want red wine, you just proceed to use the purple grape-skin more. However, you can't make red wine from the green grapes - that's just so...

The hat has made its way to The Indian Express' GS Vivek's head.

Remembered A Walk In The Clouds from the early days of Star Movies, but in Australia at least, there's no erotic dance on top of the grapes to make the wine happen. It's all mechanised. A lot of the grapes are picked by hand, granted, but most of it is machine-picked and processed. The end result is fantastic. Especially for the whites, of which I tasted three varieties. The two reds I tried weren't particularly good, though truth is that I don't have a taste for wine.

Of course, there was a bit of work involved as well, and I've managed to put together a fairly decent colour story for the office.
PS: And yes, we finally spotted a live kangaroo. It ran alongside our bus for a while, and then once we stopped for it, it rushed across the road right in front of us.