Eating and Drinking (mostly drinking) our way through Adelaide and the Barossa

Adelaide is the capital of South Australia, and the fifth-largest city in Australia (topped by, in order from largest to smallest: Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Perth). Aussies often describe Adelaide as “a big country town”, meaning that it’s friendly, informal, quiet, clean, and chilled out. Our friends from Adelaide really love it there, and speak so highly of it, and enthusiastically gave us long lists of recommendations of things to see and do.

Adelaide also boasts access to some deservedly world-famous wine regions: Clare Valley, Barossa Valley, McLaren Vale, and the Coonawarra. Our livers and waistlines were (somewhat) recovered from our time in Margaret River, so we were soooo ready for this.

Our first stop was “the Wheaty”, a renowned craft beer bar and brewery with an extensive tap and bottle list. Check out their website, it’s very cool! The vibe was great, it was a warm sunny day, and we chilled out in the beer garden for a bit, before heading up north to meet some travel friends for dinner at a Mexican restaurant I’d read about in the NY Times and was eager to try.

We were both SUPER excited for great Mexican, because while Australia is amazing in a lot of ways, y’all don’t have many Mexican cooks here. Most Mexican restaurants are run by people who have been to Mexico and loved the cuisine and brought it back, which is cool, but it’s not remotely like the Mexican we’re used to from when we lived in California and the local taqueria was a part of everyday eating for everyone.

Sadly, we weren’t super impressed with Taco Quetzalcoatl. I will leave it at that, but we’re still on the hunt for really great Mexican in Australia.

Luckily, our friends at dinner had a FANTASTIC recommendation for dessert that night – Shibui Dessert Bar in downtown Adelaide left us absolutely impressed.

I still haven’t stopped thinking about those doughnuts from Nick’s dessert choice. Thanks for the recco, Ingrid!! And sorry ours didn’t quite work out.

The next day we just had a “lay day”, doing laundry and writing blog posts and eating healthy food to offset the gluttony of the day before. We had booked a fantastic AirBNB which had a small kitchen, work area, laundry, air conditioning, and most importantly great Telstra connectivity! Our family probably wonders why it seems like every time we FaceTime them, we’re in a hotel or B&B, when we’re supposed to be spending the year in a tent – it’s because Australia’s mobile network is really, really concentrated in the cities – there isn’t much in the bush.

 

The next morning we embarked on our mini tour of Adelaide, curated by our friend Dylan in Sydney, who grew up in Adelaide. He’s a big fan of all the city has to offer and his enthusiastic recommendations were part of the reason we decided to pause for a while in Adelaide. We started off our Dylan tour at a breakfast spot he recommended, another winner – my coconut rice pudding and iced coffee was perfect for what was shaping up to be a super hot day.

There was a mural next door to Exchange which was a nice segue to what was next on our Adelaide tour….

…the Art Gallery! Dylan had sung the praises of the Art Gallery as extremely well curated, and we agree – some areas of the museum felt like your eccentric aunt’s living room, with many pieces from different eras, regions, and styles displayed in the same area, usually with a theme (like death or love) tying them together. Here’s one of my favourite examples of the “Auntie’s Living Room” method:

From the Art Gallery we headed on a bit of a pub crawl, visiting a couple of classic Adelaide old-school Aussie Pubs: the Exeter, established 1851, and the Crown & Anchor, established 1853; as well as a newer addition to the Adelaide scene – and one of Nick’s favourite breweries – Pirate Life (established 2014).

 

You’ll be shocked to learn it was lights out for us early that night – not the least because the following day, we were about to meet up with a friend of ours who had kindly offered to take us on a home-grown tour of the Barossa wine region! He had grown up in the area, then moved away for work – and we met him up in Kununurra in Western Australia while on this trip. Happily our paths had crossed again by chance, as we both happened to be in the Adelaide area at the same time. Awesome.

We were in the middle of a heatwave in South Australia, and the temperature for our wine tour days was up in the 40’s. The highest we observed was 47ºC (117ºF) – a good day to be driving around blasting the air con, that’s for sure.

We had an absolutely amazing time touring wine country with Ian, cruising around and seeing stuff is just so enjoyable when you’re sharing the experience with a friend.

Ian also is a big fan of fortified wines and while we weren’t really into them, he’s now gotten us educated and on board! We now love a nice tawny or fortified, especially on a cold evening. You’ve just got to be a bit careful with them, the hangover can be wicked the next day!

We mainly visited smaller, boutique wineries, but did make a stop at Jacob’s Creek, which is famous worldwide for excellent and consistent Barossa wines.

Even though Jacob’s Creek is renowned worldwide, I’d say the winery we were most excited to visit was Rockford, we’d tried several of their wines at restaurants in Sydney, and received a beautiful bottle of the basket press Shiraz (only available for purchase at their winery, limit of 3 bottles per person!) as a goodbye gift when we left Sydney. Rockford certainly didn’t disappoint – we enjoyed every wine they had on offer, plus the atmosphere of their small cellar door was super quaint, and the staff was so very passionate and enthusiastic about their wines. We were reluctant to escape with only three bottles!!

After a day and a half of touring wine country with Ian, you guys know the drill, we had to move on – it was now nearing the end of January, and our ferry to Tasmania left Melbourne on 1 Feb, and there was no missing out on that!!