Anyone ever done any wine tours in the Barossa Valley they'd care to recommend?

Any wine tour is a good wine tour... unless they take you to places that charge for tastings.

I didn't do a tour per se last year but went to a bunch of vinyards that my friends down there reccomended, you can get a barossa winery map from just about any info centre in Adelaide and then just pick the ones to drive to that you know you like the wines of.

I ended up buying about half of the wines I got that day from Wolfblass winery even with visiting about 7 or 8 of the 40+ that litter the countryside and decided that was quite enough.

It just about took all day to visit that many and get a decent tasting in at each one.

Yeh, I'm tempted to rent a car and drive around - but I want to taste the wine too :)

Take friends!

They do all the driving and you do all the drinking, it's win win!
Holy crap! I just looked at the cost of a tour...
Golly Gosh!

Cmon guys aren't we a bit young for this?

trog.

hire a care, visit 3 wineries a day over about 5/6 days and always slepp at the third one.

Its the ONLY way to do the barossa, or mclaren vale, or connawarra - ok, i made my point ;)

Really s*** advice here.

Apart from being name dropping pretentious wankers... drinking and driving is dumb, almost as dumb as going on winery tours expecting not to drink.

A day trip per person including lunch should max out around $70 or $80. More then 100 per head and you been ripped.

The wife and I did a great wine tour there last year when we went down for our wedding anniversay. We stayed at the Windsor and we were going to to the average type tour but the concierge suggested we spend the extra and do the more upmarket one. Well it was $180 each and when the chap arrived with the nice air conditioned mini coach we discovered that we were the only people he had on his list for the day!! It was bloody awesome, the guy was very veyr knowledgeable about all the vinyards we visited, had a fantastic (included) lunch at Domain Chandon, bought a s***load of wine ect..

The tour was really good because when we arrived at each vinyard we didnt just go into the normal tasting areas with the 'punters' off the RSL coaches & f***wit plebs just driving round getting free piss, but rather into a private tasting areas. At De Bortoli we went into the private boardroom with the head winemaker and had cheeses/buscuits ect. whislt he explained the different styles of their range. excellent stuff... and we slowly tasted the wines, never rushed. It was defineately the upmarket tour to do but it was worth every bloody cent! We had such a great time time we bought the driver a nice bottle at one of the wineries and the missus organised a subscription to 'Wine' magazine which her company prints.

HIGHLY recommend the tour. If you want I can post the actual name of the company tomorrow when the wife is awake.

*actually it might have been $180 for both of us , I'll check on that too.

:) hic!

last edited by Psycho! at 03:22:07 11/Mar/07

Most wine tours are over rated I reckon. For an average joe, you cannot seriously do more than 4-5 tastings without the wine starting to taste the same even if you do it properly. Most untrained Joes just do not have the pallete trained to pickout the obsecure and subtle flavours to fully appreciate the effort. I fall into this category myself and most people I'm sure. The really serious wine buff are amazing bunch with crazy sensitive taste palettes.

Personally I think unless you're a serious wine buff or in business of wine making it's just a big wank. So you can say to people "ohhh darling i've been to so and so vineyards that made that wine you driiiink blaj" Maybe it's just me, some people totally enjoyed it and go to every single vinyards for a week.

We did the one in Vic, NZ and got bored after about 3-4 winneries. Realistically, you shouldn't aim to "do them all" just go to a couple doing more than 2 days of wine tasting "tour" is really just over endulging. We did enjoyed the proper lunch and dinner that we had at the winneries and drinking the local produce though that was nice. The trip out in the country was also a nice change.

For a non-serious wine buff/beginners, the best thing I think you can do is just to pick a couple of vineyards (who cares if it's a "well know"/"commercial brand") that made the wine that you enjoyed and go there instead. Find out if they serve lunch / dinner and spend the time drinking wine with food, enjoyed the experience and make a day/night out of it. Instead of getting cart around all day from place to place listening to a bunch of wine experts explaing wine terms to you which you have no idea what the heck they meant.

This way you get to see who made the wine you loved and where it came from. It'll give you a better appreciation of it. $80 will buy a very nice lunch/dinner with excellent wine - usually at a discount prices, and maybe you'd even have some left over to get something to take home.

Then if you liked it so much do a wine appreciation course to expand your wine knowledge, then expand your wine tours next time. At least this time you'll understand half the stuff they're talking about :)

/end rant.

yer, there would be a million different tours you could do

in melbourne (even though we never made it, our friends still did) we had minibus to drive us around, so everyone get taste the wine, but you can still tell them which wineries you want to do (or let them suggest)

did the same thing in stanthorpe, private tours!

hunter valley, we took a big bus, but only coz we had a large group for that one

wifey and i are going to return to melbourne and do a private tour with just the two of us

barossa valley next year, and then margaret river after that!

wine is awesome

you'd be suprised how nice the wine is (and many winiries there are ) even at mt tambourine@! (although i got stuck driving at that one, NEVER AGAIN, being a sober driver in a car full of drunkys is not fun)

google up barossa wine tours troggles and go nuts

if you got a decent group, go a private tour, else just get on a bus tour with everyone else! usually they throw in a spanky lunch at one of the winiries also

Most wine tours are over rated I reckon. For an average joe, you cannot seriously do more than 4-5 tastings without the wine starting to taste the same even if you do it properly.

I find one or two plain salty corn chips washed down with water seems to clear your taste away for the next wine, or at least helps

A very light sparkling white also clears your pallette fairly well if you are tasting strong reds such as a bold Shiraz or a smokey merlot.
I never tried the salty corn chips though, gives me something new to try out next tasting :).

Really s*** advice here.

Not really, thats how we did it as part of the Sommellier course and it was fantastic.

Dude you are either failing to plan or planning to fail. There are courses that teach you how to blow yourself up... does that mean durka jidah bombing is a good idea ?

Wine tastings = drinking = not driving, unless you are spitting it out, in which case you are more Anti-Australian then a non lamb eating vegan cat lover with a bent for gay rights and a hate of footy.

Opec all the ones I have been on aim for 4 - 6, 4 seems a good number. And honestly I think its just a way to visit a bunch of wineries try lots of wines, and have a drink for relatively few $$$s.

ps. The comment about not being able to taste the wine properly after a few, while true ir also not true. Its important that you get wines that taste good once you've had a few... becuase sometimes you want a wine once you're past "the subltlies" stage.

pps. I honestly believe if I did a double blind test with a bunch of people that blather about how various regions interstate are better then Stanthorpe/Romaville/Queensland wines, that less then 5% of the people would acurately pick the region on 10 from 10 bottles (5% is accounting for random dumb luck). I know I couldn't.

Bit like double blind tests I have seen done with red and white wines and 50% of punters not even being able to tell which is which, usually preceded by comments like "I don't like white wines".

Two bits of advice from me, and i know my tours.

1. Try to stick to a tour if you are going to do one which has no more than like 12 people if possible. This means the group is a lot smaller and can often get into the smaller more boutique wineries or more wineries.

2. If going to self drive get a Cellar Door Pass its like $100 and includes 6 bottles of wine (worth around $20 each) plus discounts on more bottles and shipping back to your home for 1 dozen bottles. Bargain ++

I honestly believe if I did a double blind test with a bunch of people that blather about how various regions interstate are better then Stanthorpe/Romaville/Queensland wines,

completely rediculous. QLD wine is terrible, and not because the people don't know how to make wine, but simply because the climate isn't suited to growing. Stanthorpe wines are fine, particularly their whites.

2. If going to self drive get a Cellar Door Pass its like $100 and includes 6 bottles of wine (worth around $20 each) plus discounts on more bottles and shipping back to your home for 1 dozen bottles. Bargain ++

Is that just for one vineyard? or multiple?

ridiculous.

if you like sweet wines, make sure you visit Kellermeister and try their 2006 Frontignac Auslese. Best wine ever.

QLD wine is terrible

theres a mob at tamborine that made the best lychee wine evar

completely rediculous. QLD wine is terrible, and not because the people don't know how to make wine, but simply because the climate isn't suited to growing. Stanthorpe wines are fine, particularly their whites.

Dear spidz, I know you are product of the inferior Ipswich education system... but Stanthorpe is in Queensland, and most of the good wine in that region comes from down around Ballandean (the town not the estate). And such a broad sweeping statement is just plain sad. For instance the fortified wines from Romaville get 4.5 or 5 stars every year from Winestate.

Kingaroy wine fyi

i'm getting sent down to orange, nsw for good food week by work. invitations from wineries ftw. i love my job. good food, great wine.

So I ended up going for the Easter weekend; had a couple of days in Adelaide which would have been much better had both my girlfriend and I not come down with a nasty cold. Fortunately though, we were both well for the tour.

I ended up going with Barossa Experience Tours; the dude there Werner was a total legend. He totally went the extra mile for us in a lot of ways (picked us up from bus stop, dropped us off for dinner, heaps of s*** - dead set champ). He also managed to scam us some cool tastings of wines that other people didn't get to try (including trying some of the stuff from the Henshke vats so we could compare what it tastes like in the vats compared to when its bottled).

We ended up hitting 7 wineries (which is more than most people apparently) whilst managing not to get s***faced tasting wines. We stuck exclusively to reds and had a great lunch platter at one of the places whose name eludes me (I'll post it later when I remember).

The tour was expensive but it kicked the crap out of the alternative, I reckon. We weren't out to get drunk and actually wanted to taste wines, but we also wanted to drink them, so I'm glad we didn't drive. We got to pick our own intinerary and Werner recommended a few other places and just generally showed us around and explained a lot of the process, which was really interesting.

Vote #1 tour and those guys are highly recommended.

some of my pics

Yeah, me and a mate did it one year. It is a nice trip, plus s***loads of free wine.

sounds awesome, i <3 barossa and hope to go there soon.

i just spent the weekend in orange, paid for by cumulus wines, eating dinner at phillip shaw's house, taking a tour of his winery doing a barrel tasting of the new vintage and also trying the wines still on lees in the vats. and then there was the 150 person banquet table laid out in the cellar on saturday night with a huge range of cabernets from cool climate regions. best food evar too.

yup, me and wifey are keen too

sounds teh goods

you could pretty much take any tour though

we aint been on a bad wine tasting tour yet!@

Pics look good trog. I think in the near future myself and the ladyfriend will be going on one of these tours.

Yeh in all honesty I was a little dubious about it but once we kicked it off, it was great fun.

Didn't know u got into teh wine trogz0rz??

Pretty weird, my brother and his wife just went for a tour there last week. We're going to drink a bottle of Richard Grove 2002 Shiraz the night before they leave.

Hey gimpy, you should head down with your girlfri.......HAHAHA nevermind

Does it make you feel good inside being mean to people :(

Does it make you feel good inside being mean to people :(

Yeah, it feels about as good as making love to a woman. Especially a hot dentist one. Oh wait...

You better not be having sex with my dentist...

has anyone seen wine made out of fruit in aus? fruit as in currants cherries etc I'd be interested as i've had some good stuff made of cherries and black current in the triangle of italy france and switzerland and havent drank anything similair to that ever :(

as to red's, we sure make some of the best red's in the world, i tend to like shiraz mix wines and anything out from SA is prettygoodo

yup, we found a winery driving from townsville to cairns (surprisingly)
so we stopped in, they didnt use grapes, but all kinds of fruits

picked up a couple of really nice bottles of port for the old man, and some lychee wine for us (we love that stuff) and some other suprisingly nice gear

it was awesome!

murdering point winery i believe it was

http://www.murderingpointwinery.com.au/

(after a quick bit of reading) pretty much any winery up in nth qld uses fruit other than grapes!~

that's because in queensland it's too hot to make wine for any sort of commercial level economically viable.
vine yields are too low and it takes a lot of effort.
there are a very small number of wineries in qld and not many of them do a particularly good job.
i'm also going to melbourne tomorrow, and if i can organise transport, i'll be heading out to the giant steps winery in the yarra valley.

Stanthorpe (Granite Belt) has like 70 wineries itself and quite a lot use their own grapes. Sirromet gets its grapes from Ballandean too. Stanthorpe also now teaches viticulture (bach degree) through USQ, one of 2 schools in the country. And weather wise - Stanthorpe is as cold as the southern states, during winter it constantly drops below 0deg at night, usually gets a few nights around -8deg a year too. During the day you get use to days of 10deg max. It also doesn't rain much, when not in drought. I think it is fine for grapes and good wine. I actually saw a few bottles of Stanthorpe wine when I was in Europe and Singapore too, it can't be all bad :)