Queensland

I worked a few more days at the winery helping to crush the last of the reds.  Mike (Huggy Bear) had some trouble getting the press screens in after a thorough cleaning of the press so Sam (Badger) got in too to help out and I found the image comical...

Press loading process:

The rest of my last few weeks in “Margs” were so much fun, just hanging out, catching up with friends, making some new friends, celebrating birthdays and people’s moving on from the area, off somewhere new or back home or maybe to their next vintage location.  We celebrated cinco de mayo, and even though nobody knew the significance of the holiday we had some variation of Mexican food and watched the sunset on the beach.  Then we went back to the "Juniper house" (where a bunch of friends live, on the Juniper winery property), where people who had worked at a 30 years of Wilyabrup Cabernets tasting brought the leftover wines, and we enjoyed tasting a few of those.

The next week I attended a tasting of Cabernets of Margaret River regions from 2012, and then had a goodbye dinner at the winery on my last night in the area.  I headed back up to Perth so I could have better luck selling my car.  I went for a walk on a nice day and even though it’s not really my idea of a great view, had to take this picture:

I caught up with Alice, my old flatmate from NZ, and we had a beer and a snack at the Little Creatures brewery (open up a little!) with this view of the harbor at sunset:

With my car sold and all my belongings packed into my two bags I boarded a plane and headed to Queensland.  I hung out around a beach for a day, then visited a koala sanctuary, definitely one of my highlights of eastern aus:

Today I went to the Noosa International Food and Wine Festival, where I tasted some awesome local foods as well as international dishes, and saw some food preparation presentations by (apparently) famous chefs.  At the hostel where I stayed someone asked me if I was on holiday and I was confused for a second... it just feels like part of my life now, but yes, I guess I am technically on holiday at the moment... Tomorrow is a beach day (weather permitting) and Monday I head back to New Zealand!

Great Southern

I can’t believe I didn’t include this gem in my last post – me stomping the Pinot!

And a tribute to the new cellar door (tasting room):

My job ended abruptly after the picking was finished and all the crushing gear was cleaned, as all there was left to do was barrel work and wait for a very extended maceration of the top cabernets.  Our vintage party involved morning champagne, super golf (an easy version of golf with lighter clubs with larger faces and larger but lighter golf balls that were brightly colored so they were easier to find even though I still managed to lose one), 

a long-table lunch down by the Margaret river, and then a sort of continuation of the celebration at Britta’s lovely house.  The day involved some delicious wines including a Hafner Chardonnay, which immensely impressed the very hard to impress Watsons (well done Hafners!), a Spottswoode Cabernet (always well received), Chateaux Margaux, Hill of Grace, many other delicious wines, and ended with a 1927 Port:

With my free time the following week I decided to take off for a couple days and go camping in the Great Southern region.  The drive was beautiful (good thing because it was very long), I visited a couple good wineries (they make a good Pinot, as it is cooler down south), and on the way back I stopped at the south-western tip of Australia, Cape Leeuwin, which has this lighthouse:

And is yet another point where two oceans meet, this time the Southern and the Indian.  I swam in both that day J

Wilyabrup

Woodlands Wines is in Wilyabrup, supposedly the best subregion for growing Cabernet grapes in Western Australia.  It is a pretty small winery, with a somewhat rustic feel considering the various tank sizes and conditions, mostly bought used at a great bargain, the state of the laboratory, scattered with tools, thermometers, hydrometers, beakers, chemicals, sulfur and pH testing machines, additives (lots of tartaric acid), and of course an espresso machine and a fridge generally stocked with Roger’s beer.  Side note on Roger’s beer, it is made by a brewery called Little Creatures, that also makes a pale ale modeled after Sierra Nevada (and almost as good!).  The wine makers are very particular about how clean they want each piece of equipment before use, so a large portion of my time at the winery is spent in rubber gloves and safety glasses, handling caustic cleaning agents and citric acid to neutralize.  I have also gotten to do some barrel work, fruit receival, sorting, pressing, racking, inoculating, and lots of pump overs, accompanied by temp, baume (brix), and pH testing.  We worked a lot of hours during the busiest times, but they usually managed to give a day off here and there to everyone.  They also made dinner for us (accompanied by a glass or two of wine) if we were there late, which was always delicious.  I had my birthday off, and got to spend a second February birthday in the summer, this time on a beach:

Then they cooked me dinner at the winery on my birthday as well, including a beautiful cake decorated by Emilie, the 11-year-old daughter of the wine maker:

I also had St. Patrick’s day off, which turned into another beautiful day at the beach:

 (yes I'm wearing green!)

Cowaramup

I thought the names in New Zealand were weird until I came to Australia.  Cowaramup, Wilyabrup, Marangaroo, Yallingup, Metricup, Gnarawary to name a few weird ones I’ve encountered.  Wilyabrup is where Woodlands is located, and down the road a ways in Cowaramup, where I will be living.  Eventually I will be living here:

This amazing rammed earth cottage out in the middle of about 200 acres of land, apparently with sheep during some parts of the year, particularly lambing season, which I am already excited about even though it is months away.   I will be living here with Kirsten, the cellar door manager from Florida, after her current roommates move out later this month.  I was invited to the house for a little gathering of Kirsten’s neighbors and friends and the neighbors’ friends, who came down for the weekend from Perth.  A couple of them are from Tauranga, New Zealand, where I was last year for about 3 months… small world. 

This next section is not for the faint of heart.  You were warned.  Kirsten and her boyfriend have quite a few chickens, and decided to reduce their stock that night so they invited over the owner of the property to help with this.  A couple little boys were there playing with the chickens and got to select the victims.  Some of the gatherers participated in various parts of the process and the others watched as they were hung from a tree by their feet, their heads were held to stretch the necks out, and they were decapitated.  We’ve all heard the phrase “running around like a chicken with its head cut off;” this is no joke.  For about a full minute after losing their heads, the chickens fluttered their wings and thrashed around from their dangling points on the tree.  After this calmed down they would still twitch every once in a while for the next few minutes.  After the chickens were fully limp, they were taken down, soaked in hot water for a minute to loosen the feathers, dunked in cool water so as not to be cooked, and they were plucked.  After all the feathers were gone and the meat was bare, they were gutted with a special process of cutting off the feet, cutting around where the tail was and pulling everything out of the middle, then tucking the wings in and putting the legs through slots made in the skin.  Right before our eyes they were transformed from fluffy, clucking, walking creatures to pieces of white raw meat as you would see in a grocery store… welcome to Australia!  

The rest of the evening was fun as we sampled some wines, socialized, played table tennis, and ate the product of their hard work.

I got back to Andrew’s cottage, where I’m staying for a night or two, and he asked if the possum had bothered me at all.  I said, um, no, what possum, and he pointed to the ceiling in the kitchen, where a tail was hanging down through a small hole!  Then we noticed next to it was a tiny little tail, of the possum’s baby!  Again, welcome to Australia!

The name Cowaramup clearly has something to do with cows… I’m not sure how exactly the name came about, but cows are the general symbol of the town, particularly this statue in the middle of the park in town:

It is the product of a local artist in response to a controversial statue of a naked lady in a diving position on a similar platform that was ridiculed by about half the local public (the other half liked it).  That one was named as “Free as a bird” but was more commonly called “Chick on a stick,” so the cow was named “Free as a cow,” and is more commonly known as “Rump on a Stump” or “Roast on a Post.”