Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Wine Tour in the Yarra Valley

Our third day in Melbourne, we took a wine tour in the Yarra River Valley.
The Yarra Valley is about an hour northeast of Melbourne and it is absolutely beautiful!


The first winery we stopped at was a place called Punt Road. Their land used to be part of the Fosters brewery's land (FYI ordering Foster's in Australia is like ordering Corona in Mexico, you will get some strange looks) but when the bush fires came through in '09, they lost their crops and sold it off to Punt Road. It's called Punt Road because they found an old painting of one of the first roads to cross the river into Melbourne - Punt Road.

This is overlooking their orchard. The land was first used as an apple and pear orchard and so the new owners decided to embrace it and make cider.

They have a pear and apple cider along with their entire list of wines. Very good.


This winery holds the largest wine making facility in the valley and they make several wines for other, smaller wineries.

The second winery we visited was Coombe Farms. We loved this place! We all sat down and one of the owners brought us the wine. We really got to know the people on our tour as well as drink some great wine!



Coombe Farms' main business is growing grapes for other wineries.


This place was also our tour guide's favorite place and she told us a great story about the winery and the Royal Wedding!

The family that owns the winery is know for being great Opera singers back in London before they came to Australia and they still have family there. When the Royal wedding came about this past year between William and Kate (now Catherine), one family member was the Master of the Queen's Horses and therefore drove the couple in the carriage the day of the wedding.

The family presented the new couple with 60, 6 Liter bottles of their reserve Cabernet Merlot and it was served at the wedding reception. We got to drink it too!

Here is one of the bottles. It was not sent because it was damaged in the bush fires! It got so hot that the cork partially popped out!

This is our tour guide Di (pronounced like Princess Diana)

She has worked and does work at multiple wineries in the Valley and was extremely knowledgeable. She "tasted" some wines too, but her pours were much larger than ours...

It was a great wine and we even bought a bottle. Unfortunately we won't be bringing back to the states so we have to drink it before we leave.


After the first two wineries and drinking probably 7-12 tastings at each, we were in need of lunch. The third winery, Oakridge Estates offered us a great lunch along with the tastings.

We met another couple from Texas and were talking through most of this tour so I do not quite remember much about the wines. (This is not related to the number of prior tastings)

I do know that they had two types of wines - the Over the Shoulder label was from grapes at the bottom of the Valley and the other brand, Duck Valley, was from higher in the mountains!

This was the Over the Shoulder.

You can see the beautiful mountains in the background - this was our lunchtime view!



The last winery was Sticks and it had the best view of the day!


This winery was owned by a retired AFL (Australian Rules football) player. It is named Sticks because that was his nickname during his time as a player. He was called "Sticks" because he was tall and skinny, but the now he is just tall. :)

Amazing!


We had a fantastic day and love learning all about the Yarra Valley and some of their fabulous wineries!

Cheers Mate!


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