Yarra Valley Winery Tour

Saturday I splurged and booked a winery tour in the Yarra Valley. I’ve never visited a winery but after seeing the movie Sideways, I have really wanted to do it. When I woke up on Saturday morning, I was kicking myself for scheduling something on a Saturday that had me waking up at 6:30am but quickly got over that. It was a small tour, only 21 people max. and I was surprised to find I was the only American among a few Germans, a handful of Brits, and the rest all Aussies.

The Aussies were way into their wine, using terms I had never heard before. I mean, is wine really “structured”? While everyone else was sitting there looking slightly bored as the tour guide explained what it meant when wine had legs (high alcohol content), I was taking it all in for the first time. There was this terrific show on in the UK this summer when I arrived and it was called something like James and Oz’s Wine Adventure, with two Brits traveling through California wine country. One was very knowledgeable about wine and one was not. While they were traveling to one winery the knowledgeable one was explaining how the wine they would taste at the next place asks the drinker questions. The one not so knowledgeable about wine said something like, “I don’t want wine to ask me questions, I want to ask the wine questions like will you get me a wee bit drunk?” I felt like I fell in the middle of those two.

Since I was a solo traveler, our tour guide asked me if I wanted to sit up front with him. This was wonderful because I had a terrific view of the countryside and could also ask him questions.

When I got on the bus, having had a few glasses of wine the night before and wanting a quiet beginning to the day, I was happy that when he asked everyone in the bus to turn to someone they didn’t know and introduce themselves, that I had already done that when I met him. He looked at me and said “J-, you know I’m going to throw you back there at some point to meet some people, that’s half the fun”. I thought to myself like hell you are. But I have to say, I met some wonderful people on the tour. Everyone was so friendly and chatty without being in anyone’s face. I had this vision of us all being drunk by the end of the day but everyone was just in a good mood.

And the movie Sideways was discussed during the tour. At the first winery when the host started pouring us a tasting of merlot, one of the ladies in the group laughed and said "I'm not drinking merlot!" The host rolled his eyes and said, "Yeah, I've heard that about a hundred times since that movie came out".