Tasting

I’m behind with my blipping because our cabin in the Hunter Valley didn’t have good enough Wi-Fi to upload….
Good night’s sleep and woke to beautiful morning with lots of birdsong (again!) and sun slanting through the red flowers on the banksia(?) tree beyond our terrace. We’re staying on an estate that’s set up like a family resort…lots of small cabins to stay in and then farm animals and vineyard exploration, Segway tours and pony rides. The mid term school holidays finished yesterday so it’s very quiet and we got a great last minute deal for the night. The deal also came with breakfast, and with a complementary wine tasting and film of wine making. However the DVD machine was broken so we, as the only people on the tour, ended up with a personal talk from the guy in charge, telling us all about wine making generally and their vineyard in particular, including hearing about the trouble they’ve faced from smoke tainting following bush fires, lack of pickers during Covid, and then rain during harvests. The ground is currently still soaked and they’re hearing the coming summer may be another wet one so a real worry for growers. The estate next door had closed down and we saw the huge tanks being crushed (at first we’d thought it was some sort of art installation as they lay twisted and dented in a pile). We were surprised to hear how small most of the vineyards are around the Hunter Valley too…most of Australia’s wine comes from further south and west. Then he guided K through tasting 9(!) different wines. Chatted away for about an hour and a half with him and it was great (despite his views on ‘activists’ and vegans being somewhat reactionary). We then went to another estate to taste cheese from their affiliated dairy. Loved the ash rolled Brie but the cheddar style wasn’t strong enough we didn’t think…(helped soak up K’s wine though!).Afterwards went to visit another vineyard that supposedly had a deli to look round but it was very tiny, but the verandah and building was lovely with the sun glinting through the water feature and vines trailing all around.
From there we headed to Leogate estate for our lunch. I’d been trying unsuccessfully to remember which estate I’d been to with D&R all those years ago when I last came here but just couldn’t find it, and we were annoyed that many estate restaurants are closed on Mondays, so it was a bit of a struggle to find somewhere but this one looked good.
We decided to each have a two course lunch but to do it by sharing the starter and dessert. It was all delicious….mussels in a green Thai sauce, crispy belly pork with cauliflower and apple sauces and scallops for me and one of their signature fillet steaks for K, then white wine baked pears with hazelnut granola and blue cheese ice cream. Yummy!
Then it was time to leave the area and we loaded up and drove to the Blue Mountains. We decided to take the cross country route over more mountains, and listened to The Women of Troy book as we travelled. Also continued ‘teaching’ K some Italian from my vast Duolingo experience. She’s really grasped the sea creatures words and we found ourselves in giggles as she bellowed out ‘una balena’ (a whale) as the answer to any vocab question I put to her!
Less good road than yesterday, with potholes and roadworks in several places, no kangaroos again, and yet more strangely named creeks and occasional tiny ‘towns’ scattered along the way.
We arrived in Katoomba and found the AirBnB place we had booked…staying in a self contained flat as part of a lady’s house. She talked us through the (many!) house rules then left us to settle in and we decided just to hunker down for the evening with the heating on (much colder here!), tea and some chocolate that she’d left us and to look through photos etc etc.
Spoke to T…he suspects P may have another infection as he was saying some strange things again today when he visited today on his 94th birthday. Apparently he was very grumpy and telling T just to leave his key as ‘his friend Barry’ would now do his shopping for him (he doesn’t have a friend called Barry). Also T had had to contact the carer agency to complain that their visits were too irregular, sometimes having 7 hours between visits followed by another an hour and a half later, rather than every 4 hours as planned. Sigh…sooner we get a new care plan worked out the better.