We recently traveled over to Adelaide in South Australia without the kids, so we decided to make the most of it and take a tour around the beautiful Barossa Valley wine region and do some wine tasting. There are quite a lot of tour companies that do wine tours around the Barossa but after a lot of brochure searching and trip advisor research, we finally settled on an Enjoy Adelaide full day Enjoy the Barossa Tour.
We were staying at the Hilton Adelaide and got picked up from the hotel at 8.40 am. There were a few other pick-ups around Adelaide and we departed the city at 9.00 am. Our driver for the day was Adrian who was a wealth of knowledge on the region and provided a few laughs along the way. We went on a Saturday and had a total of 16 people on the bus which was a good comfortable crowd.
After a 45-minute drive, the first stop is at the World’s Largest Rocking Horse & Toy Factory in Gumeracha, located in the Adelaide Hills. We spent about half an hour here – there is a little cafe if you need a coffee and some morning tea, as well as a toy factory to do some shopping. There is also a little wildlife park if you want to go and feed some native Australian animals (entry is $1.00 per person and a bag of food is $2.00).
Just another 10 minutes down the road is the next step which is the Whispering Wall at the Barossa Reservoir. This is a unique experience where you get to actually hear for yourself the amazing acoustics of this dam wall. You can hear very softly spoken words from opposite sides of the wall – which are over 100 meters apart from each other. It is one of those things that you need to experience to truly believe it.
It is then on to the first winery stop of the day which is the Barossa Chateau. Here you get a structured wine tasting as well as a guided tour around their impressive antique collection. We really enjoyed the wines at this family winery and even ordered a case to be delivered to Melbourne, which promptly arrived a couple of days later. There is also some free time to look around their gift shop or go for a walk around the lovely rose gardens.
The next stop incorporates a wine tasting and lunch at another family winery – Kies Wines. Have to say the lunch here was absolutely beautiful. It consisted of share platters, one was a chicken mango salad and the other a cheese platter which was full of beautiful produce from the Barossa Valley (if you require a vegetarian meal, be sure to mention it when booking). They also provide a cake platter for dessert which was very nice.
If you enjoy Ports or Honey Meads, you will really enjoy the next winery which is Chateau Dorrien as they specialize in that area. Please note that for this stop you can choose to do the wine tasting here or opt to pop into the Maggie Beer shop down the road (at an extra cost of $10 pp).
The last stop in our Barossa Valley tour is at the larger Wolf Blass Cellar Door. To be honest this was our least favorite as the staff was not as friendly and it felt a bit more rushed here. As Wolf Blass is such a big label here in Australia, we didn’t feel like we were getting anything really special that we couldn’t buy from our local Dan Murphy’s.
We really enjoyed the Enjoy Adelaide Barossa Valley Winery Tour and would recommend it to anyone when visiting Adelaide.
