The Canuck and Mr Orly go Wine Tasting

Escaping from the evil clutches of Gary and Eddie, we made our way to the only nearby hostel that had room for us: a hippie haven called Bambu. Once there, we discovered it was only marginally better than the hell-hole we’d left, and came complete with bed-bugs, crappy kitchen, filthy bathrooms and zombie-like French stoners endlessly stumbling about the corridor. (As I sagely noted to Angela, if you will market your hostel to hippies, you’re only ever going to end up in a whole heap of shit.)

Ang getting ready to binge drink.

Luckily that weekend was a bank holiday weekend (or long weekend if you’re not English), and we’d booked a weekend away in the Margaret River wine region about 3 hours south of Perth. We picked up our car rental as soon as we finished work - and got a car that was only on its’ second rental. (Why is new stuff always so much better? It even had that new car smell, and on the way down I was sadly excited to be taking it over the 1,000km mark on the distance counter thing.) Somehow we managed to make it down to our accommodation in Dunsborough without getting properly lost, and also without taking out any kangaroos. There was a slight surprise during checking in; as over the phone during booking, my name had apparently morphed into Johnson Orly, (a slight variation on the ‘Johnson London’ that the lady checking my U. S. Visa when travelling from Albany to Montreal had taken me to be.) Though I was more than happy to be addressed as Mr Orly for the duration of my stay, the presentation of my passport sadly cleared up the issue.

We signed up to a wine tour for the next day, which, although billed as a ‘half-day’ tour, still managed to take us to 5 vineyards, a cheese company, a chocolate company and a brewery. Andy, our driver and tour guide, looked more like the sort of bloke that enjoyed the odd keg of beer rather than the odd glass of wine, but he did seem to know his stuff. He threw plenty of wine facts at us as we careened around the dirt tracks between the vineyards, and I was left clinging to the hope that my knowing the names of a couple of grape types would see me through without too much embarrassment. I thought if I could throw in a couple of ‘mmm……fruity’ comments, or mention something about tannins then I’d be able to cover my tracks.

Ollie tasting a precocious red with flavours of blackcurrants & bacon fat

The first vineyard was an ‘open tasting’ one. This meant that rather than only letting them know when you didn’t want to try something, you had to be proactive and ask for stuff. Naturally, this ended up being the place where we had least. The next vineyard was legendary. Here, they plied us with every single wine in their range, which I think was at least a dozen, including reds, whites, rosés, sparkling whites, sparking reds and port. As I was in the process of working out how the Merlot was heavier in the mouth than the Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot, Ang came towards me brandishing a piece of laminated card that was to become our laymans guide to bull-shitting a wine-tasting. On it we found a massive list of adjectives that could (apparently) be used to describe a wine‘s taste or smell. Some of the more interesting ones: forest floor; pencil shavings; bacon fat; burnt toast and scorched earth. Aromas could be anything from ‘playful’ to ‘daring to be different’. Angela actually reckoned she could taste some burnt toast in hers, and not looking to be the one with crappy taste-buds I pretended I could too.

The forest, some ferns, and the sun

By the fifth vineyard, we both felt that all the wines pretty much tasted the same, and evidently Andy was becoming a little bored too, as we then began to investigate the other fineries on offer in Margaret River. First to the chocolate company, where, if you were prepared to join a queue at least 20 people deep, you could take as many chocolate drops as you could carry for free. Then off to the cheese place. As much as I do like cheese, free samples of this didn’t quite excite me as much as the free wine had. Finally, Andy decided to take us off to the first brewery to be set up in the area. It’s been there 12 months. To be fair though, the beer was decent, and sipping it while looking out over the surrounding fields as the sun set was a pretty good end to the day.

We spent another day driving down to Augusta, which is right on the coast about an hours drive further south from Dunsborough. Here, we saw the point at which the Indian and Southern Oceans met, and had also hoped to see some migrating whales. It was only when we got there that it occurred to us that we might not actually be able to see them from the shore. The road back took us through some really nice forest and, nearer to Dunsborough, past some massive caves. We stopped at Mammoth Cave for a look around and an argument about which ones were stalactites and which ones were stalagmites.

Geographe Bay

On our way back to Perth we stopped to spend some time posing for pictures at Bunker Bay on the white sandy beaches in front of a turquoise sea. All thoughts of bedbugs and crazy landlords were banished. We’d managed to book back in to the first hostel we’d stayed at (and our favourite), so were able to look forward to a nice, easy, stress free last few weeks working in Perth.

The Canuck and Mr Orly go Wine Tasting

Margaret River, Australia