By Rob

Our morning started with a hunt for Oprah around the hotel. For some reason, she was not at the breakfast buffet with the commoners! We don’t typically eat a big breakfast, but opted for food to get us started since we are doing a tour of four wineries today.

The most interesting part of our morning, since there was no Oprah sighting, was the honey station on the buffet. Instead of jars of honey, you could carve from a honeycomb. It was unique, but do I really need free range, bespoke, haute couture, session, small batch, artisanal, locally sourced honey with my granola? Instead of foraging for honey, how about a honey bear? Sorry, is my inner Brevard County showing?

Our wine tour with Hop On Hop Off, Barossa Valley takes us to four wineries throughout the day (from a list of 8 winery options). We are joined on this tour with only one other pair – the lovely Emma and Bella from Melbourne (Australia, not Florida). It was a beautiful day in the valley, with sunny skies and temps in the high 60s.

The first of our winery stops was Corryton Burge. We sampled 6 wines, including a unique sparkling red. We’ve had many different glasses of bubbles, but sparkling reds are popular around Adelaide.

Second winery was Lambert Estates and included a sample of four wines and a dessert “port”. The port is officially a “fortified wine” since it is not produced in Portugal. This version was chocolate infused and quite delicious (would be great with vanilla ice cream!).

Third stop was Saltram. We four were the only people at this winery for the tasting, so we received extra attention and a few staff favorite concoctions, such as their take on sangria. We also compared the same wine from 2023 and 2012 noting differences in flavor and smoothness.

Our final stop for the day was First Drop Wines. They are most known for their Mother’s Milk Shiraz. We sampled this along with a few others including a rose and a port.

Our tour driver gave us some great information and insights into the Adelaide and the Barossa Valley area, including history and local architecture.

We returned to central Adelaide at 5:00 pm. After saying farewell to our wine drinking friends and tour driver (Dean) we headed back to the hotel for a much needed nap. BTW, Dean is a retired fireman and drives these tours a few days a week as a retirement gig. Since I already have the uniform, maybe this is an option for me?

This evening we headed into Chinatown for dinner. We had delicious sizzling shrimp and scallops along with a chicken with black bean hot pot. 😋

Side note . . . I haven’t been able to watch much college football over the past 3 months. I was checking scores today and it is odd that Duke wins the ACC and Indiana is the Big 10 champs. Are we sure this is not basketball? And yes, I know, UGA wins the SEC and UCF had a losing record, again (blah blah blah). 😑 🙃

Tomorrow we are on the road again, heading for Kangaroo Island. Thanks for adventuring with us.