Thursday, April 20, 2006
A day of food, trains and wine
The day begins at 7 with the persistent ringing of an alarm clock. Through the haze of sleep i roll over and wonder who in the world can be so cruel as to set an alarm loud enough to wake the dead and worse still at such an ungodly hour. i continue my semi-slumber until something in my mind clicks and i realise that today is thursday-- excursion day in Yarra Valley, and that the stupid alarm clock is mine.
As i rouse i hear the click of my housemates' doors opening. I lumber into the bathroom where i join the others there to brush my teeth and get ready to leave.
It is now 7.30am and time to set off for our meeting point on Swanston St. There is the grumpy early morning silence as we walk to the city to meet our tour guide. Occasionally someone breaks the silence by enthusing about the trip (mostly Mel, I think) As for me, I plod on, my only contribution to the scant conversation is to moan about my sleepiness. (i know, I'm a sheer basket case in the mornings)
We meet our driver, Kevin, who is round and jolly and has a knack for conversation. Only it is 8 in the morning and conversation generally only works when the listener is awake.
We reach our first destination: the delicious scone place. Sadly, my mind fails to recall the name of the place, only that it serves nice fluffy scones with delicious cream and strawberry jam. i am now a little more awake-- not enough for any proper form of cognition to occur but awake enough at least to remember wishing for more piping hot scones.
This is us at the little scone place: (front row from left to right) Justin, Mel, Mart, Siu Niang, Kai Jin, Me and Yixin.
After breakfast, it is off to the Puffing Billy train ride. The Puffing Billy is a steam engine that began its maiden journey in 1901 and ran till 1958. It was 1 of 4 experimental lines used to develop the rural parts of Eastern Victoria. Today, it is a major tourist attraction and runs from Belgrave to Gembrook on the same narrow gauge railway track that it did a century ago.
This is Yixin and I sitting on the ledge dangling our legs over the side of the train.
We stop at the first station, Menzies Creek and meet out tour guide to embark on the 2nd part of our trip-- William Ricketts aboriginal sculpture centre. It is at this point in the bus when Yixin announces that she's hungry and Mel asks what's for lunch and Kevin replies "pan-fried chicken, fish and scotch fillet" and everybody oohs and aahs appropriately and counts down the hours to lunch.
Unfortunately, there isn't much for me to write about William Ricketts other than i found his sculptures all too spiritual and the setting of the sculptures in the dense, dark Australian Bush way too eerie and forbidding, so much so that I was more than glad to leave the place behind for lunch and a pleasant afternoon of wine tasting.
As we make our way down from the dandenong ranges to the Yarra Valley, i am struck by the plainness of the Australian Bush. Much as i appreciate the raw wilderness of the bush, the Australian bush just doesn't appeal to me. Perhaps it is because the colour of the bush is just so earthen-- hues of brown and green and not much else aside from that. Being a person who finds beauty in a vivid explosion of colours or the stark contrast of them, the bush just seems too uniform, too monotonous.
We spend the entire afternoon visiting 3 wineries. The first, Rochford wineries, is where we have lunch and are initiated into the complicated process of wine tasting. You begin with inspection. Observe the colour of the wine. Red or white, light or dark. Light coloured wines tend to be younger while the darker ones tend to have been aged for a while. Next comes the smelling which starts off with the swirling and swishing of the wine in your glass to aerate it. Then you place your nostrils just over the rim of the glass and breathe deeply. Then you exhale and if appropriate give a contented sigh and inhale again. From these breaths you ascertain the fruitiness and oakiness of the wine and try to identify the many elements that makes it up. Lastly comes the actual tasting. You take a small mouthful and run it over your entire palate appreciating taste and texture. Texture lies in the way the wine treats the palate, whether it is harsh or soft. Taste, on the other hand, is like smelling. It involves discovering how fruity and nutty and oaky it is, identifying the flavours it contains and most importantly, deciding whether you like it or not. I find it to be a most educational time for indeed, I had never known that one could do so many things to a glass of wine. To be absolutely honest, before today, the only verbs I could associate with wine were gulp, guzzle and slosh, which, I'm fully aware, would hardly be anything to be proud about.
As the afternoon progresses we are ferried from one winery to another and i am tickled by how red our faces have turned from the alcohol. Genetics is a funny thing, how it equips the anglo saxon race with more than enough acetyldehyde dehydrogenase to guzzle down half a bottle of wine with little or no effect while the chinese race struggles, red faced, to consume half a glass and still remain standing. But there is no time to contemplate the injustice of this for we are whisked off to the next winerery--Punt point. And thus we continue our afternoon of wine-tasting, mostly in a state of quasi- inebriation, ending up eventually at green point wineries which prides itself in its sparkling wines. We order a glass each of every single wine featured on the wine list and i fall in love with the sparkling chandon pinot shiraz instantaneously. And so I go and buy one- this red, bubbly, fruity, moderately sweet wine with slightly spicy overtones that was soft on the palate- even though it sets me back $24 which means 3 less lunches outside.
This is us with 7 bubbly glasses of wine.
The trip ends with a stroll through the vineyards and we do the last thing we are capable of-- collapse on the grass in a heap and contemplate all the things that made this day a wonderful one.
As i rouse i hear the click of my housemates' doors opening. I lumber into the bathroom where i join the others there to brush my teeth and get ready to leave.
It is now 7.30am and time to set off for our meeting point on Swanston St. There is the grumpy early morning silence as we walk to the city to meet our tour guide. Occasionally someone breaks the silence by enthusing about the trip (mostly Mel, I think) As for me, I plod on, my only contribution to the scant conversation is to moan about my sleepiness. (i know, I'm a sheer basket case in the mornings)
We meet our driver, Kevin, who is round and jolly and has a knack for conversation. Only it is 8 in the morning and conversation generally only works when the listener is awake.
We reach our first destination: the delicious scone place. Sadly, my mind fails to recall the name of the place, only that it serves nice fluffy scones with delicious cream and strawberry jam. i am now a little more awake-- not enough for any proper form of cognition to occur but awake enough at least to remember wishing for more piping hot scones.
This is us at the little scone place: (front row from left to right) Justin, Mel, Mart, Siu Niang, Kai Jin, Me and Yixin.
After breakfast, it is off to the Puffing Billy train ride. The Puffing Billy is a steam engine that began its maiden journey in 1901 and ran till 1958. It was 1 of 4 experimental lines used to develop the rural parts of Eastern Victoria. Today, it is a major tourist attraction and runs from Belgrave to Gembrook on the same narrow gauge railway track that it did a century ago.
This is Yixin and I sitting on the ledge dangling our legs over the side of the train.
We stop at the first station, Menzies Creek and meet out tour guide to embark on the 2nd part of our trip-- William Ricketts aboriginal sculpture centre. It is at this point in the bus when Yixin announces that she's hungry and Mel asks what's for lunch and Kevin replies "pan-fried chicken, fish and scotch fillet" and everybody oohs and aahs appropriately and counts down the hours to lunch.
Unfortunately, there isn't much for me to write about William Ricketts other than i found his sculptures all too spiritual and the setting of the sculptures in the dense, dark Australian Bush way too eerie and forbidding, so much so that I was more than glad to leave the place behind for lunch and a pleasant afternoon of wine tasting.
As we make our way down from the dandenong ranges to the Yarra Valley, i am struck by the plainness of the Australian Bush. Much as i appreciate the raw wilderness of the bush, the Australian bush just doesn't appeal to me. Perhaps it is because the colour of the bush is just so earthen-- hues of brown and green and not much else aside from that. Being a person who finds beauty in a vivid explosion of colours or the stark contrast of them, the bush just seems too uniform, too monotonous.
We spend the entire afternoon visiting 3 wineries. The first, Rochford wineries, is where we have lunch and are initiated into the complicated process of wine tasting. You begin with inspection. Observe the colour of the wine. Red or white, light or dark. Light coloured wines tend to be younger while the darker ones tend to have been aged for a while. Next comes the smelling which starts off with the swirling and swishing of the wine in your glass to aerate it. Then you place your nostrils just over the rim of the glass and breathe deeply. Then you exhale and if appropriate give a contented sigh and inhale again. From these breaths you ascertain the fruitiness and oakiness of the wine and try to identify the many elements that makes it up. Lastly comes the actual tasting. You take a small mouthful and run it over your entire palate appreciating taste and texture. Texture lies in the way the wine treats the palate, whether it is harsh or soft. Taste, on the other hand, is like smelling. It involves discovering how fruity and nutty and oaky it is, identifying the flavours it contains and most importantly, deciding whether you like it or not. I find it to be a most educational time for indeed, I had never known that one could do so many things to a glass of wine. To be absolutely honest, before today, the only verbs I could associate with wine were gulp, guzzle and slosh, which, I'm fully aware, would hardly be anything to be proud about.
As the afternoon progresses we are ferried from one winery to another and i am tickled by how red our faces have turned from the alcohol. Genetics is a funny thing, how it equips the anglo saxon race with more than enough acetyldehyde dehydrogenase to guzzle down half a bottle of wine with little or no effect while the chinese race struggles, red faced, to consume half a glass and still remain standing. But there is no time to contemplate the injustice of this for we are whisked off to the next winerery--Punt point. And thus we continue our afternoon of wine-tasting, mostly in a state of quasi- inebriation, ending up eventually at green point wineries which prides itself in its sparkling wines. We order a glass each of every single wine featured on the wine list and i fall in love with the sparkling chandon pinot shiraz instantaneously. And so I go and buy one- this red, bubbly, fruity, moderately sweet wine with slightly spicy overtones that was soft on the palate- even though it sets me back $24 which means 3 less lunches outside.
This is us with 7 bubbly glasses of wine.
The trip ends with a stroll through the vineyards and we do the last thing we are capable of-- collapse on the grass in a heap and contemplate all the things that made this day a wonderful one.
# posted by H : 8:39 PM
