Friends in the world

This time, in Adelaide someone is waiting for my arrival. At dawn Nicole and Derek, a couple of super nice globetrotters I met in Granada, during a Couchsurfing happy hour organized by a Bulgarian guy under a business trip (!), come to pick me up at the bus station. They will host me in their house, with their two kids, and will let me live a real “Aussie experience” for the day. After a nice 3-hours long walk in town, between Royal Botanic Gardens – here I see for the first time bats nested on the tress – and the parks in Adelaide, a quiet and residential city, with a very large extension, we have breakfast (eggs&bacon of course!), pick up the car and head towards McLaren Valley, for a wine tasting tour.

Weird landscape & nice grape

About 40 km from Adelaide, McLaren Valley, listed among the “Great Wine Capitals of the world” (see here the complete list), is mainly popular for its red wines made from Shiraz grapes, but here they cultivate also Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay. The landscape is insane: exactly like our beloved Tuscany, but ten times bigger.

We stop in two different vineyards. The first one, AlphaBox and Dice, is a funny and young farm that wants to create a true “wine alphabet” (each letter corresponds to a wine), the second one is the famous D’Harenberg’s “Cube”, a cube-shaped building, white and green as a puzzle, in the middle of the vineyards. Chester Osborne created it with the aim to show the complexity of the different facets of wine experience. In addition to classic wine tasting, on its 5 floors you have sensory experiences and psychedelic multimedia installations, telling the story of the estate; the wines are really high-quality, and would not look out of place even in Italy.

The return to Adelaide is a long huge sunset over the ocean: Noarlunga Beach, Seacliff, Brighton, until you get to Goody’s town for a beer and a burger. I go to bed really early, tomorrow the alarm clock is at 5 a.m. to take Uber, bus and ferry to Kangaroo Island…