Wine and Cheese, Beer and Vurst

Over the weekend, H and I went on a tour of the Swan Valley wine country with H’s company. We showed up at H’s office promptly at 9:45 AM for the 10:00 AM bus departure. Shockingly promptly at 10:00 AM, we boarded the bus. Five minutes later, we disembarked. Why? The bus lacked seat belts which per H’s company’s safety policy, was not allowed. Safety first! Cowboys wear chaps, Eskimos wear fur, engineers wear coveralls and seatbelts.

It took about forty minutes for a bus with seatbelts to arrive, during which time I got a very enjoyable tour of H’s new office, very different and much nicer than the one in Doha, despite the lack of Tea Boys to hand deliver coffee, tea, biscuits, and fresh fruit. At about 11:00 we finally departed to Swan Valley wine country and were reminded by the ‘tour guide’ to pace ourselves through the two vineyards and two breweries as we would be sampling about sixteen different wines and up to ten different beers.

The first vineyard left us almost a bottle per person to pour our tastes ourselves. Unsurprisingly, there was nothing left when we departed less than an hour later. The only real winner of the bunch was a late harvest dessert wine but nothing was terrible. Sadly, the same couldn’t be said for the second vineyard. Some of the wines were so terrible that I was almost tempted to dump some of my samples onto the grass. The only redeeming factor of the vineyard was the local assorted cheese plates that they provided alongside of the wine. The creamy cheddar was so good that we bought a wedge to take home.

The real winner of the day was Duckstein Brewery where we sampled the entire range of their incredibly delicious micro-brewed beers and had a tasty and fun pork-filled lunch, accompanied by live music. (After two years in a pork-free country, H and are going a bit crazy with the pig consumption). Having recently visited Berlin, let me just say that this beer was even better than the motherland brews! I recommend visiting and tasting them all, H and I will definitely be going back! As my tour guide of Potsdam said “some fun there can be had!”