Tasting wine in Hermanus

Highlights of a wonderful day in Hermanus and surrounds included ...

• A walk along the ocean front admiring the old harbour and stunning, rocky coast line.
• A delicious meal of grilled calamari and seared tuna.
• Revisiting the little stretch of coast where I scattered dad's ashes - a very emotional moment for me.
• Exploring the Hermanus wine route.  It's fantastic!  Lovely wine, very scenic and much less commercialised than the better know wine hot spots like Stellenbosch and Franschhoek. 
• The drive from Hermanus to Caledon (which I'd never done before and reaching) and discovering the lovely Spookfontein; a  beautiful farm in a sublime setting with delicious wine and port and a very friendly wine host who served us despite us arriving after closing time. 

Hermanus Wine route

The lovely Spookfontein

Weekend at The Hunter Valley

Dani and I had a great weekend in the vineyards of Hunter Valley.  There was plenty of rain on Saturday, but that didn't stop us from visiting lots of vineyards and sampling plenty of wine.  

Some highlights of the weekend:

• Picking up Dani in Newcastle on Friday afternoon after she'd had a meeting there with other University sustainability managers.
• The amazing views from our room.
• A delicious pizza at a very nice restaurant on Friday night.
• Watching several episodes of "Breaking Bad."  What a great series, highly recommended.
• Visiting vineyards and trying lots of wine.
• Selecting delicious home made chocolates at a local chocolate shop.
• On Sunday morning, the best mocha and delicious crumble at a restaurant specialising in nothing but desserts.
• Checking out lots of great sculptures at one of the wine farms.
• Hunting down a bottle of sparkling Shiraz.
• Discovering that most of the ways out of the Hunter Valley were closed due to floods.  It took us quite a while to get back home!

Views of the vineyard from our hotel

view from hotel room

Delicious dessert for breakfast

One of the restaurants in Hunter Valley specialises entirely on desserts.  What an amazing selection of mouth-watering treasures they had.  And what difficult decisions.  I had Apple and Rasberry Crumble and Dani tucked into Lemon Merengue Pie.  The highlight, though, was the Mocha that came with a jug of rich, molten chocolate that we had to spoon in ourselves.  Best Mocha of my life and I've sampled quite a few!

Mocha doesn't come better

Dani wasn't being a glutton - half of that was mine!

Statues at a local vineyard

One of the vineyards we visited had a great art gallery and a statue garden.  Here are some of the statues that caught my eye.

When floods get in the way of home

We took an extra couple of hours to get home because it had been raining hard, and the first two routes we tried turned out to be flooded!

Mudgee

Mudgee was our last stop on our trip before heading back to Sydney.  This town is most famous for its surrounding vineyards.  Needless to say, we visited some of them and tasted some lovely wines.  My favourite was the Sparkling Shiraz - absolutely delicious it was.  The chap in charge of the final cellar we visited was presidedly tiddly (it was New Year's Day after all) and he allowed us to pour our own wine to taste while belting out some loud songs.  

The town itself was very attractive with some lovely buildings and churches.  On New Year's Day it was like a ghost town with everything shut except a local pub where we enjoyed a nice lunch.

The Hunter Valley

A great photographic weekend away including hot air ballooning, old buildings and beautiful horses and birds, great people

The Hunter Valley Gardens

Pepper Convent

Statues

Vineyards

Jumping

Well captured, Guy!

Franschhoek (Cape Town)

Franschhoek is special to me as Ally and I came here several times for romantic weekends away.  We used to eat lunch at one of my favourite restaurants in the world, Le Petit Ferme.  Then, when we got married, we came here on our honeymoon.  So many wonderful memories attached to this place.