Tiffany and Greg Around the World
Really? Really!? 10 years.
(ok, or aluminum…yeah)
What the heck would we even use tin for?
And are we supposed to carry this in our backpacks!?
Dude, lame.
Forget this, it’s not like we’ve been following the rules anyway, so why start now?
10th wedding anniversary sounds like…amusement parks and fondue.
Yes. That should work well.
We had two opportunities to check out the wine regions of Victoria. The first was just after we finished up our time working at a horse racing stable and the second is when we decided a mandatory piece of the great Australian road trip with Tiffany’s brother Chris was to jump-start his education on “How to find wines I like?” While both visits were brief, they both netted solid results on quality vino.
Unfortunately, it was easier to find the beers of Victoria elsewhere in the country than the wines.
518 people
About 466 miles from “Cans“
Sometimes, oh and without warning of course, the whole town just separates from the mainland and becomes an island for a few months…so you want to watch out for that.
and the largest gator (sorry…CROC…because it matters while it’s eating you…) ever caught in the history of the planet? Yeah, right down the road.
28ft, 4in long. This is a to-scale model!
Welcome to Karumba
South Australia, AU
We didn’t plan on spending too much time here, however the Beast had other plans. Upside, we got to see a zombie parade and ride the cross-Australia train. Downside, it’s hard to go wine tasting when your wheels decide it’s time for retirement in mid-trip. And led us to get creative in our transportation options
However even with the limited exploration range and curtailed time frame, SA did surprisingly well. (to be fair, we had the inside scoop)
Sydney, the Blue Mountains, Bondi beach and an Opera house – New South Wales is pretty much what all of us think of when we hear the word “Australia.”
Between driving the coast, bumming around Sydney and working in the ski resorts, we spent a good amount of time here and got to taste our way around. We even got a chance to check out their most famous wine region: The Hunter Valley.
New South Wales was also the first time we found a grog that 2 sailors would choose to pour out instead of drink. So, from our highest rating to inventing a new low there was quite a spread for New South Wales:
What chronicle of our many adventures tending bars in the remote outreaches of the Outback would be complete without a pub quiz?
Here in Australia many of the beers do you the courtesy of printing questions right on the bottle caps so their customers can all stay in constant training for that next pub quiz night. Consequently, one works at an Australian pub long enough – pretty much about a week really – and one ends up with a working database of Quiz questions.
Questions that make you feel really, really ignorant – or, in Greg’s case, sometimes grateful for being a bit of nerd:
Greg has a long-standing belief that tropical climates produce some of the best wine. His logic comes from visiting wineries in Florida.
Yes, Florida has wineries. We’ll get to that later.
The short of it is that the environment does not lend itself well to heavy wines. The climate of the tropics in general inspires beverages that are a little lighter, a little sweeter with fruit flavors often at the forefront and best served well-chilled.
Where, yes, you can actually make use of a personal wineglass cozy.
So the tropics pretty much inspire the exact kinds of wine we enjoy and the single winery we found up here did not disappoint.
Well since we’re going over adventures in outback bar tending, it’s probably about time we started updating the grog files to keep us with us.
We’ll be doing a new grog files for each state we visited in Australia but this week is all about our overall experience, which can be summed up this way:
Australia has a great libations industry –
It’s just not where you’d expect to find it.
What this pretty much means is that as long as you avoid the beer, Australia has a lot to offer.
One of several murals over the urinals in Oktoberfest beer tents.
Who do these people think they are, Kiwis!?
We did our very best to have as authentic an experience as we could at Oktoberfest
Continue reading “Lederhosen!”
New Zealand – North Island
Type: Soft Drink
Rating: 3 sheets to the wind
Website: http://www.cokecareers.co.nz/products
(yeah, Coke bought ‘em. That’s globozation for ya.)
Notes: It would be wrong to have a page about the drinks of New Zealand and not mention Lemon & Paeroa. It’s the New Zealand soft drink and we’re really not sure why it hasn’t become a world-wide sensation! Like you’ll see in other places on this page, New Zealand does not save their best efforts for “the good stuff” because even their widely distributed common drinks are just excellent. Continue reading “NZ North Island Grog Files”
