yarra valley grape grazing festival

Yesterday I was Canadian. And started drinking champagne at 9:30 in the morning. Those two things are only sort-of unrelated.

As I was standing downstairs the other day waiting to get into the “business center” in my apartment building to print something I was nonchalantly looking at the bulletin-board beside me. A colorful flyer headed something like “looking for something to do on Sunday February 19th?” caught my eye, so I kept reading and discovered that there was a winery-tour thang happening. Becca (Skidmore) and I decided to jump on the bandwagon.


Wineaware, through Beverage Masters (that so isn’t important) had a package deal for the Yarra Valley Grape Grazing Festival. So at 9:00 yesterday morning Becca and I (yes, Becca 1 and Becca 2) boarded a coach bus across the street from the Queen Victoria Market, in front of Beverage Masters. And at 9:30, on the bus, we each had a glass of champagne. I can safely say that that is, by far, the earliest I have ever started drinking.

We went to three different wineries throughout the course of the day: Helen’s Hill Estate, Yering Farm, and Train Trak. (It turns out the owner of Train Trak is the cousin of the owner of Beverage Masters). Apparently Yering Station is famous/well-known and Yering Farm is it’s “sister” winery. I’m not sure why Helen Hill’s Estate (or if the sisterness to the well-knownness is relevant to why were at Yering) but, if you’re interested, the best wine I had all day was the Chardonnay at Helen Hill’s.

It is very strange, I would just like to say, to fly half way around the world and hear the same music as you would at home. We were sitting outside at wineries listening to Australians play songs like ‘Take Me Home Country Road” out of the backs/sides of trucks. Bizarre.


We were told during orientation that unlike in the United States, where politics is one of three things you don’t discuss with people you don’t know well, Australians who learn you are American will frequently want to talk politics. On the bus on the way back from the last winery Becca and I had a wonderful political conversation with the Australian couple sitting in front of us who deemed us to be “down-to-earth” Americans… and who said they were educated enough to know that not all Americans are red-neck Bush supporters. We had another interesting conversation with an Aussie from the trip who sat down with us while we were having lunch. He told us how he thinks it just doesn’t make sense anymore for Australians to pretend they’re isolated or politically removed. “The Americans, the Brits, the Aussies… it’s bloody all of us!” (In reference to bad present world politics.)

Why were we Canadian? Yeah… we wondered too. After slight intoxication at the first winery one of the people at the front of the bus near the microphone decide to announce as we approached the second winery that if anyone hadn’t met the two Canadians, they should say hello. That would be us. We decided that it was much cooler to be Canadian so we wouldn’t correct them. Throughout the trip we informed those people we actually chatted with of our rotten nationality. And we wanted, at the end of the trip, to ask the guy who decided we were Canadian why it was that he had concluded that… but a fight broke out on the bus on the way home and he was mediating when we got off. So we left wondering.

The absolute, hands-down, best aspect of this adventure was the time on the bus watching [apparently all bar affiliated, we learned later] Aussies become progressively drunk, increasingly roudy, and steadily more social. (They also became more and more sunburned… they sunburn too and aren’t * always * smarter about sunscreen, apparently.)