Australia winning and Australian wine

I've been doing a bit more than work for the last few weeks. When Pete was in town for a few days I got round to visiting the Museum of South Australia, the Art Gallery of South Australia and the Don Bradman Collection which is joined to the Library of South Australia. Just as we were leaving the Don Bradman Collection we noticed there was some kind of event upstairs. It turned out to be the judging of an art competition set by the Royal South Australian Socitety for the Arts. Normally that wouldn't have interested us enough to walk up a sizeable flight of stairs but we were told that free glasses of wine were being handed out up there so headed up for a look. Not only was there free wine but free crisps as well!! Man, talk about being in the right place at the right time! We probably looked a bit out of place among the arty types as Pete and I were both wearing baseball caps but I saw a couple of guys wearing berets so clearly headwear was allowed at the venue. Apparently you were supposed to buy a ticket for $5 but I only found that out later.

I've been watching as much of the World Cup as I can although it's on during the night here. I only missed one of the first 16 matches (South Korea vs Togo) as well as the first half of England vs Paraguay and Australia vs Japan, each time due to being at work.

The Australia vs Japan game kicked off at 10.30pm across here. That night I was due to work until 11pm but, due to printer problems, I never got out the shop until half time. Since it takes about an hour and twenty minutes to walk to my hostel or a little over an hour to make it to a city centre pub from my work I had to watch the second half in Marcellina's, the pizza place next door to the video shop. There was a bit of a subdued atmosphere among the staff when I arrived as Australia was trailing 1-0 but the few of us around made plenty of noise when the Socceroos got their first, then second, then third goals in the final 10 minutes. Some comeback!

After the match I headed back to the city centre to find a massive crowd had flooded the streets and were singing, dancing, drinking and just generally celebrating in the middle of the road. I followed the crowd the length of Rundle Street, then Rundle Mall (the main shopping street) and then halfway along Hindley Street(the main drinking street) as they sang Waltzing Matilda and Advance Australia Fair. It was a great atmosphere a bit like the crowds in Calendar Park after the '97 Scottish Cup final but with more people and a bit more vandalism. I'll try and post a couple of pics on here and maybe a video if I can figure out how.

On Thursday night I watched the England vs Trinidad and Tobago match in a pub called The Rosemont, just a couple of streets up from my hostel. I'd watched the Scottish and FA Cup finals there and so had a fair idea that there might be a few England fans in the place. Well there were more than a few and most of them were fairly drunk and very vocal so I kept my talking to a minimum, stopping short of attempting an English accent every time I ordered a drink at the bar. That was probably for the best as, about 65 minutes into the game, a 7 or 8 man brawl broke out which involved some thrown furniture. I don't know why it started, or who won. I'm just glad that everybody else was too busy celebrating at the goals to realise I wasn't.

About 3 hours after I got to bed that night/morning I had to get up as me and another 5 people from my hostel had booked to go on a winetasting tour of the Barossa Valley, where around 55% of Australian wine is produced. We got picked up in a minibus by JR, our driver and guide, and were later joined buy around 6 other people from other hostels.

Our first stop was Gumeracha, a small town which is home to the world's biggest rocking horse. After leaving there we visited the "Whispering Wall" at the Barossa Reservoir. The wall is the reservoir dam and it turns out that, due to some acoustic coincidence, if you stand at one end of the dam and speak towards the wall the sound travels 160ft to the other side and anybody at the other side can hear you as clearly as if you were only a few feet away. Apparently the effect was discovered by builders working on the dam when a guy at one side was slagging off a guy on the other side who heard the conversation resulting in a fight on top of the dam. Lovely story.

We then headed on to the Orlando winery which is home to the Jacob's Creek label. After a brief talk on the history of the company we were taken through a structured wine tasting, starting with a sparkling white and moving through the whites to red and finishing with a port. We were told how to hold a glass, check the wine for foreign bodies, swirl the glass, sniff the wine then taste it. There was a bucket on hand for the real connoisseurs to spit the wine into but clearly that's not what I was going to be doing.

After Orlando we headed to a small boutique winery called Vinecrest for another structured tasting, again from sparkling to white to red to port. We did the same again at another winery called Richmond Grove before heading to the pub for lunch. I had a mixed grill of lamb chops and kangaroo fillet. Mmm, kangaroo. Tastes a lot like beef but with a hint of game about it.

The final stop of the day was the last winery, called Bethany wines. There was no structure to the session there so it was a case of ask for whatever you wanted. That sounded like "all you can drink" to me but the lady at the bar tried to coax everybody onto the reds and then port as fast as possible so that they couldn't really go back on to the whites. Subtle.

I was impressed that I managed to stay awake the whole way home.