4th Day in Adelaide

Penfold's Winery.
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I got up at 8:30am and showered. I had to catched a bus to Magill for the Penfolds Magill Estate Winery tour at 11:00am. I didn't know how far away it was and what time the bus left the city. I got to the bus stop and I had about 25 minutes, so I called a few people back home. I talked to my brother who was working and wished him a happy birthday even though it was his birthday back home, it was here. I also got a chance to talk to Anthony briefly since he was also working with my brother. I caught the bus around 10:00am and it took about 35 minutes to get to the winery. I had some time to look around the Cellar Door, which was the tasting bar that had some of the winery history. The tour started at 11am and it was only myself and two older couples. The tour guide was actually one of the four wine makers at the winery, so he was very knowledgable about the whole process. We first went and looked at the vineyards and he gave us the history of the winery back to the doctor who came to Adelaide from England and brought vines from Europe. Back in those days wine was used by doctors for a number of ailments. In the late 1800s it was a booming winery and was storing and producing the majority of the wine in the area. Today they have only the vineyards that were around the winery and the cottage. Almost all the grapes from the vineyards on the estate are used to make their premium wines and are not blended. One of the famous and very popular wines in the United States in the Grange wine. Next we went to the Fermenting building where they were actually fermenting a batch from the estate grapes. It is an open fermentation with wood planks used to hold the grape peeling in the wine to absorb the tannens from the skins. Next we went into the winery's cellars and saw the current Grange and Estate wine barrels ageing. The wine maker said that about four barrels of Grange was worth almost a million dollars, as a bottle of current vintage sells for $500. Then we went deeper into the cellar and got to see the complete set of Grange bottles of wine from 1951 to current. Grange was created by Max Schubert and this wine takes a minimum of four years of american oak ageing before it is bottled. Then the wine can age anywhere upto fifty years before it is at its best. The final part of the tour was the tasting back at the Cellar Door. We tried a few whites a Riesling, some Chardonnay, and then the good stuff. We had an amazing Cabernet Sauvignon, another rare one I don't remember the name, and a few Shiraz that were really good. I think we got to try some of the more expensive wines that are not usually on this tour, since the wine maker was the tour guide and was like what else would I like to try. After about ten or twelve tastes, we finished with a 10 year old Tawny that was sweet, but had no harsh bite afterwards. The tannens soften and smooth out with age that is why it is so much more expensive the longer it is aged. After the tour I grabbed the bus back to the city and hopped on another bus which took me to the zoo. The Adelaide Zoo was pretty cool, they had alot of neat animals. I got to see the Lion and the Pengiun feeding, which was fun. They had Meercats, Giraffes, Tree Kangaroos, Australian Sea Lions, Red Pandas, small Mongeese, Hippos, Orangatangs, Chimps, Baboons, and lots of other cool animals. I travelled all the way to Australia and I got to see an American Alligator. I spent a little over two hours at the zoo and then caught a bus back to the center of the city. When I got back three new people had moved into my room. One of them was there, he was a young German guy that was in Australia for about six months on a work Visa and was looking for work. I helped get his MP3 player working using my laptop. We had to move all his music to my computer and format the MP3 player and then reload it all. I grabbed so dinner and tried to watch the 2nd game of the Commonwealth Cricket Finals, but it was on rain delay. I ended up watching only a few overs and the Australia were way behind and probably lost. I ended up going to bed before it was over since it was pretty late and the bar in the hostel was closing. The other two people in my room where also German, but didn't speak much English. They decide to open the window when they went to bed and I knew that lot of bugs would come in since there were not screens on the windows. I had closed in earlier in the day, but they opened it again. I just tried to get as much of me under the blanket as the bugs started buzzing around.

I travelled all the way to Australia and I got to see an American Alligator.