Adelaide Hills Wine Guide: Keith visits some of the wineries in Adelaide Hills region of South Australia
The Adelaide Hills are the defining blue backdrop to the city of Adelaide and are an increasingly popular alternative to the city.
In the last 20 or 30 years there's been another growing reason for heading for the hills. The Adelaide Hills Wine Region has been growing in size and reputation and a new Cellar Door Guide has been produced to help you find your way around.
The Adelaide Hills winegrowing district cuts a seventy-kilometre swathe through the Mount Lofty Ranges from Mount Crawford in the north to Mount Pleasant in the south.
It also offers some of the most breathtaking scenery you'll find anywhere. At times it looks like a postcards from Tuscany or provincial France… but the gumtrees give it away.
And much of it is under half an hour from the city. Any time's a good time to head for the hills but late Autumn is very special. There's plenty of colour.
There are more than three thousand hectares of vines, twenty-nine wineries in all, including twenty cellar doors.
And there are some real beauties among them. Just getting to the likes of Barratt Wines at Summertown is part of the experience. On the drive in, the stringy-barks up the gully give way to a striking English feel garden. Even the stunning maples were in full colour when we called in.
The Cellar Door is most intimate - not surprising because it's actually part of Lindsay and Carolyn Barratt's family home.
No standing around a bar for your wine-tasting here. Instead, you get to sit around a table and share one of Carolyn's delightfully morish platters with the people (and the pugs), who actually make the wine… and hear why they've chosen Ashton in the Hills to do it.
"We're very cool climate here," explained Carolyn. "We're on the side of a hill and 500 metres up so it's very cool climate."
"This is about as cold and as wet as it gets," added Lindsay with a smile.
He's not joking. It was raining when we were there but Lindsay reckons he's actually pruned his vines in the snow in the past!
But it's that crisp and wet weather that nurtures the hills' distinctive flavours. The grapes' fresh, clean characteristics produce some of the best cool climate wines going around. Particularly suited to Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot and Chardonnay
Like its wines - the hills offer a variety of experiences and the good part is you don't need to be a wine connoisseur to enjoy it all… you can even take the coffee tour.
At award winning Hahndorf Hill Winery for instance, the contrast with the 'burbs and city plains couldn't be greater. Here you can ponder the vines, the adjoining farmland and wooded hills beyond. And again, meet the winemakers.
Larry Jacobs, a former ER Doctor of all things and Marc Dodson, a former journalist-cum-astrologer, traded in their native South Africa to call Hahndorf home after scouring the nation for the right place to indulge in their passion.
"Everything here is handcrafted," explained Marc. "We hand pick and hand prune. We're probably what you would call artisan wine.''
Like a lot of the wineries up here, Hahndorf Hill have successfully combined winemaking with tourism - they've won two awards. No doubt Larry's culinary skills help.
"There you go Keith, you have a region on your platter!" announced Larry as he served a delightful dish of hills venison served with grilled vegetables and a sauce made from figs and his very own shiraz.
The hundreds of little valleys and gullies that make up the region each create their own microclimates - and that means each winemaker can be as individual as they wish.
That's certainly the case with the very distinctive Shaw and Smith operation. From the outside the giant colourbond 'chateau galvo' set in beautifully manicured grounds outside Balhannah, is not much more than a big tin shed.
But step inside with its creators, cousins Martin Shaw and Michael Hill-Smith and you find a state of the art winery of world class facilities. And the same can be said for its wines.
While a cellar worker hand rakes '06 vintage Cab Sav out of the fermenter in the winery, in the tasting room we're ready for take-off on one of the 'wine flight' tastings. Masterful maestro Theo takes you through the whole tasting symphony - complete with cleverly matched cheeses.
"Our wine flight is something a little bit different. It's our portfolio range, our current releases," said Theo.
As you'd expect, he really knows his stuff. He's equally at home with a group of wine aficionados or a crowd of beginners. He'll even give you a few handy tips like how and why we should swirl our wineglass.
"It releases all of the flavour. Move it around, get a bit of oxygen, a bit of air into it and release the flavour of the wine…"
It's all part of the learning process. And that's something Michael Hill-Smith reckons is going on worldwide as more and more people here and abroad learn about Adelaide Hills Wines.
"People who have been critical of the more porty alcoholic styles are going "This doesn't taste Australian!" And what I'm saying is it doesn't taste traditionally Australian, but these are the modern wines, this is the contemporary face of Australian wine making."
It's all only half an hour up the freeway - literally into the altitude of the Adelaide Hills and the unique winegrowing region that altitude brings.
Many of the wines from the region are already well known in the top restaurants of New York, Sydney and Shanghai. So locally the new Adelaide Hills Region Cellar Door Guide is going to come in very handy. Pick up a copy from any tourist information centre or from any of the wineries themselves. If you have any further questions please email info@postcards-sa.com.au
Adelaide Hills Wine Region Cellar Door Guide 2006
Available from Tourist Visitor Centres and wineriesPublished 28th May 2006
