Hunter Valley

Cheers!
Small disclaimer: you may want to read this with a glass of wine. You also may get drunk.

Andrea, Meghan and I decided to take a day trip up to Hunter Valley. Hunter Valley is one of the wine regions in Australia. I learned a lot of Australian wines. Fosters, the beer company, owns about 60% of all the wine that is exported out of Australia. Yellow Tail, one of the bigger labels that is exported, like Fosters is not really for Australian consumption. Many of brands that we have in the states are not even on the shelves here. Yellow Tail produces about 80 billion bottles per year while most of the Boutique winery's that I visited were making 3500-4000 bottles a year.
Our first stop was at Ernest Hills. There some grapes that are only grown in Australia, The Semillion and Verdelho are some of them. Here we tried; The "Cyril" Semillion, "The Chicken Shed" Chardonnay, Chambourcin, a Rose, "The Dam" Merlot, and Luna Star Semillion. Some of there wines had some bizare names (i.e Chicken shed) but that is because they would names the wines according to there proximity to diffrent locations. We ended up all really liking the rose so we bought a bottle here. The winery had just picked some of there Verdelho grape earlier that morning. The wine maker, Rosie brought in some of the fresh picked juice for us to try as well. The fresh grape juice was delish. Please remember I didn't drink entire glasses of all those wines, just tastes. Also our first stop was at 10:30 in the morning. No worries, our tour guide told us it was wine time somewhere so it was o.k. (I think 6:30pm in New York so I thought we were o.k)
The second stop took us to Iron Gate Winery. Here we also tried a variety of wines; The Semillon/Chardonnay, Verdlho, Rose (a Rose named after his mother Rose), 2 Sharaz ( purnounced shur-as), Sweet Mandala which is a combo of Semillion, Verdelho and Chardonnay, and a cold sweet Shiraz that had to be eaten with chocolate. The wines were delicious. I didn't complain at all about having to drink my wine while eating chocolate either. We quickly stopped for some lunch and cheese tasting before going to our next stop.
Next we went to Tempus Two Winery. Here Andrea and I focused on our red wines. I did try the semillion savignon Blanc first but that was just to get started. Then we Tried the Beechworth Sangiovese, Tempranillo, Zinfandel (Which is a white in the States but a red here) and the Barossa "Vine Vale" Shiraz. Andrea's favorite was the Sangioveses and mine was the Shiraz.
Then we went to Mcguigian Winery. Here we tried some a sparkling Pinot, two really good Shiraz and also one sparkling Shiraz.
Then our last stop was at Audrey Wilkenson Winery. This was one the best views from Hunter Valley. Ross, our tasting guide taught us some key phrases for ways to describe wines: B.G.R, R.B.G.R, and F.R.B.G.R. The last one is F***ing Really Bloody Good Red I am sure you can figure out the other too. Here I tried my favorite white wine, the Traminer. We also tasted a variety of Shiraz from a couple different years. They were F.R.B.G.R's. After five Winerys we concluded our day in the Hunter Valley.
Since the tour droped us off in down town Sydney, we decided to keep the party going. We opened the bottle of Rose that we bought, put it in our water bottles from earlier ( I am high class, I know) and hit the town. We walked up to Darling Harbor and found a nice spot to drink our wine, people watch, see the sunset and listen to a street performers digredo. The Sam's who had visited us in New York came in to meet us for dinner. We went to a nice restraunt on Kings Warf with the boys and then they took us to Congo Lounge for some drinking. It was nice to see more familiar faces. Apprently Sydney is trying to make some new rules regarding drinking. WE found a flyer protesting the new rules, " Can you believe what the state goverment is doing to our nightlife? 2 am lockouts from venues, closing bars for 10 minuets every hour, banning cocktails and shots after midnight, forcing us to drink out of plastic cups, outlawing bottles of wine and champagne after midnight. The goverment wants to shut down the state at 2am- our social life is under attack! We agree that anti-social behaviour is an important issue and that venues need to be safe, but the State's response is ill considered, misguided and unfair to responsible drinkers." I thought this was entertaining. Also in Bondi most of the bars kick you out at midnight but some stay open later, there are some bars that you can't wear thongs in (flip-flops), and people dress to the nines here. I felt under dressed in my jean skirt. Oh well! Sorry if this got you drunk.