Mario and Pat's Australian drive holiday

Day 26: Monday 29/9/2014 Adelaide, SA (Visited Barossa Valley)

We booked a tour of the Barossa with a tour operator called Taste the Barossa. The tour guide was Dallas Coull, who also happens to own the company. I would vote him as one of the best tour commentators I have been on. Very articulate, knowledgeable, and a great sense of humour.

Our first stop was at a dam called the "whispering wall". Dallas, said that if you had one person at each end and if they faced the wall and whispered to hit, you could hear them on the other side. I had to put this to the test. Well you could not believe how clear you could hear. It felt like they were standing next to you. The secret is in its curvature. The wall is 140 meters long and was build 112 years ago. You have to experience it to believe it.

I have been to the Barossa before, but this tour really gave me a much better feel for the history and development of the region. The tour started with a drive up through the Adelaide hills, that was really lovely, picturesque countryside. Once in the Barossa, we went to 4 different wineries for tasting, also enjoying lunch at the second winery, Peter Lehmann’s – which we also thought was the best of the four we went to.

Among the interesting stories we heard was about the Seppelt Family’s winery. As the story goes, along with the vine cuttings that Joseph Seppelt brought to Australia, he had also picked up two date palm seedlings which had grown two large date palms on the family grounds. Later, during the Depression of the 1920’s when most of the wineries closed down and many people were out of work, the Seppelts had managed to keep things going and provided basic housing and food for their workers and their families, even though no wine was being sold. In appreciation, the workers took seeds from the date palms to the Botanical Gardens in Adelaide, and managed to propagate many more palms, and planted them along the roads leading to the vineyards. Now, these corridors of palms look really majestic and are a very distinguishing feature of the Seppelt estate.

We also had a stop in Tanunda, a nice village where we had time for a short stroll to pick up a coffee or have a peak in the shops. There was also a stop at a scenic outlook, where we could see the whole Barossa Valley before us. It was really a great day, and would highly recommend this tour to anyone coming to Adelaide.