Land Down Under: A weekend of wineries

This weekend I had a nice little girls weekend at Hunter Valley. Hunter Valley is about two hours from Sydney and is known for its beauty and wineries. We rented an adorable cottage for two nights that I literally wanted to move in to. The place was two stories with three bedrooms, all of which had king size beds and your own personal heater! (which was amazing, I am starting to miss having heat on those chilly nights) Our favorite part was probably the breakfast buffet both mornings because I mean who doesn't love breakfast food, especially when its unlimited (in case you were wondering juice was included...score).

Ashleigh did a wonderful job as the party planner and booked us a great tour (and also made me dairy free gluten free cupcakes so now I love her forever!) Although our tour guide Rus (with one S) was a little bit late, we still made the best of our day. To make up for lost time Rus decided to drive 30k over the speed limit, Ash and I were literally fearing for our lives. We went to 4 different wineries, a chocolate store (which was actually a big letdown) and then a brewery. Turns out one of the guys on our tour is some tv star down in Melbourne so check out the "Barefoot Investor" because apparently that's him.

The whole wine tour thing was a lot of fun, but I am still disappointed in the lack of knowledge I have for wine. At the second place I made a real effort to ask questions, but the guy leading our tasting was real weird and kept cracking jokes that were not funny. I was hoping to come home and impress the rents with my wine skills, but that will not be the case. I did find out that I love the sweet and dessert wines, moscatos are my new favorites, I hate red wines, and really don't like chardonnays (sorry mom!)

When it comes to actually tasting the wines they really don't give you much to sample. Whenever I actually liked one I wanted to get seconds, but apparently that is not proper wine tasting etiquette because I got weird stares and never asked again. (but seriously if you like 2 out of 10 wines shouldn't you be able to have more of those?) I was a champ though and tried them all. 7 hours later we had bought collectively over 20 bottles of wine. I wish I could have bought some to take back to America but I wasn't sure customs or those crazy sniffing dogs would like that.

The next day we went on a hunt to find a winery called Audrey Wilkinsons. My parents have been there and said great things plus my grandma is named Audrey so it was a given that we had to go (altho I later learned that Audrey was a man). Anyways the google maps on Emily's iphone was giving us crazy directions but we continued to go with it for a good 30 minutes. We did some off roading on a bunch of dirt roads until we made it to a little cliff and knew this was not right. Eventually we found a phone number and called the winery. It was up on a big hill type thing and was absolutely beautiful! (well worth the road trip to get there) They had by far the best wines and I was very happy that my parents had highly suggested that we go.