Barossa Valley - Just north of Adelaide, South Australia

Barossa Valley

 On our visit to Adelaide we did a day trip to the Barossa Valley which is one of the premier wine growing regions in Australia.  We enjoyed our day and saw some interesting things – but ended up thinking that McClaren Vale (wine region just south of Adelaide) was more to our taste.

Maggie Beer's Farm Shop

We did visit Maggie Beer's Farm Shop – which was interesting.  Maggie is a lovely Australian cook who appears on various tv shows.  Her café is an eclectic mix of wine tasting, shop and café.  It was busy when we were there but if we had looked around first we would have seen that there was a whole verandah area to the right of the main entrance – also overlooking the lake that would have been much more restful.  Although the café was busy, the service was fast and the afternoon tea snack we had was very nice indeed.

Mt Pleasant Hotel Motel

Lunch that day was not as planned.  We had thought that we would have lunch in a lovely winery restaurant.  But we found ourselves not quite into the Barossa at lunch time – so we stopped in Mt Pleasant and went into a traditional looking pub.  The dining room was empty – and this was a Saturday!  The landlord came in and said that his chef was a stand in one and didn't do all of the menu but that we could have fish and chips or a steak but none of flash stuff like pasta.  We looked at each other and decided, what the heck, we would give it a go.  We both had the battered butterfish which was cooked to perfection and the chips were also beautiful.  Just goes to show you can't judge a book by its cover.  We had to go into the bar area to pay and ended up getting some great recommendations of wineries to visit in the Barossa.

We stopped at a look out over the Eden Valley – very nice spot with a nice touch of plaques on the stones telling you a bit about the history of the valley.

Yalumba winery

We enjoyed the Yalumba winery visit very much.  Lovely grounds and very helpful tasting staff who made you feel very relaxed.  I couldn't get over how generous they were with their tastings.  Something we discovered was the case throughout both the Barossa and McClaren Vale.  If you want to take full advantage of this, you need to go on a tour or at least have a designated sober driver!

And some of the wild flowers on the side of the road were fantastic.

And I enjoyed this road sign.