Not a Shiraz in the bunch!

01-03-06

Wineries galore! Now we’re talking! Pam and I left for the wineries around 9:30 and tasted our first wine at St. Hubert’s at 11:00. Unlike wine tastings in the states, where you get three or four very small glasses, Australian wineries load you up with similar sized glasses, but more like six different wines. Then, they tell you to go inside if you would like to try more. Next, we stopped at the very fancy Rochford wineries. The tour company organized our trip very well - including the excellent gourmet lunch at Rochford. The third winery was good, but they tend to run together a bit at this point. The last stop, Chandon, produced sparkling wine (which is the same thing as Champagne, but not created in Champagne, France. I was apparently the only person who didn’t know this in Vegas over fall break.) Oh yeah, our tour guide, Nick, was quite a cutie.

One of the things that I love about attending a school with such a great reputation is that I can access such a diverse network of people around the globe. A perfect example was dinner on Tuesday night. Pam and I met up with a student from that other school in Durham who is attending the same school as Pam in New Zealand. All three of us then walked a few blocks to enjoy dinner at the house of a student who spent a semester on exchange in the states. Andrea graduated from Melbourne Business School in May 2005. She was nice enough to cook dinner for the three random strangers from a town that she lived in for a brief time. We were quite lucky! We also figured out that the nightlife in Melbourne is centered around the Yarra river. Thank goodness! We feared that the Roo bar in the basement of our hostel might be our only option.