Yarra Valley Wine Tour

We got up early on a Sunday morning to meet at St. Pauls for our wine tour of the Yarra Valley. After loading up with our tour guide and about 14 other people, we shuttled out of the city and to the void between the Grampians, the Dandenongs, and the Dividing Ranges known as the Yarra Valley. A Scottish family planted the first vineyard here, and their former winery was the first of our four stops: Yerring Station.

Yerring, of similar origin to Yarra, is an Aboriginal word, meaning something like gathering place, so you see it everywhere. That, and there’s the Yarra River that winds all over Melbourne, so you have South Yarra, Yarraville, and the like.



Yerring Station is the oldest winery in Victoria, settled by Scottish brothers who happened upon the valley on their trip toward the southern tip of Australia. It’s changed hands a few times since then, but is still remembered for its history. We learned here that the Yarra Valley is primarily good for Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.

We also learned the five “S’s” of wine tasting: the Sight, the Swirl, the Sniff, the Slurp, and the Spit (or the swallow). These are unofficial terms, but it’s interesting. So here’s the summary:

1. The Sight – You always have to look at a wine against a white background, or your time is wasted. You turn the glass a little sideways so the meniscus shows better – this is more important with a red, as you can only check the color of a red by looking through its meniscus.

Now let’s clear up some misunderstandings. Looking at the “legs” on a glass of wine (how slowly the wine holds onto the side of the glass when you tilt it) isn’t how you tell much about a wine, except its alcohol and/or sugar content. Outside that, you’re wasting your time. The next time someone starts talking about the legs on a glass of wine as how you determine how good it is, smile and nod. If that’s how they determine a good wine, they are just in it for the hangover.

2. The Swirl – You swirl the wine in the glass. Pretty simple. It leads up to the sniff.

3. The Sniff – So after you swirl, you have to put your nose in the glass. Don’t be shy. Think of Steve Martin in Roxanne taking a drink of wine (little movie trivia for you). The way the wine is poured and the size of the glass for tasting contribute to the sniff. The glass has a wide bottom and a narrow top. The wine is poured to the widest point at the bottom of the glass. This allows the most surface area, which allows the most particles to take to the air for the sniff. The swirl just helps get a bunch of particles in the air for you to take in.

4. The Slurp – The official term is aspiration or something, and it’s not exactly pretty or nice. You basically try to suck in air while leaving the wine in your mouth. Kind of like blowing bubbles in milk as a child, but you have to do it while the wine is in your mouth. I think aspirate is a bad term, because medically, that implies that you accidentally choke on some of the liquid while you are trying this. Unfortunately, I would say that’s not an uncommon occurrence while you are attempting the slurp, especially with a strong wine. The slurp allows the most air to get through the wine, and causes you to be able to smell and taste the wine simultaneously, resulting in the best taste of the flavor. Try it out sometime – take a sip without the slurp, then take one with it. Remarkable.

5. The Spit (or swallow) – Wine tasters have a lot of wine to fit in, and can’t have their judgment impaired. So they spit it out. Unofficial wine tasters swallow the wine, because they paid $2 - $3 for the taste (I’m not sure how much I paid per glass, since I got it as a package deal).

Fun fact: Your taste buds are at their strongest in the morning, so you probably would like wine the LEAST in the morning, due to the strong flavor.

Fun fact #2: Blush wines (the ones that are pinkish) are not necessarily most like whites. They can go either way. More “white-like” blushes have been popularized by some Brazillian wine that everybody loved, but the more “red-like” ones are coming back in vogue. You can help the revolution.



After Yerring Station, we headed to Rochford. Rochford was a pretty swanky joint, in my opinion, and it’s where we sat down to a pleasant lunch in beautiful white room at the top of a spiral staircase. It was filled with original artwork. I had the braised lamb with a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon that was selling for $10 a bottle and was worth at least double the price (I’m cheap, okay). So I picked up my first souvenir – a bottle for the road.




Rochford also had this nifty thing – a smell testing quiz. People come up with the craziest ways of defining smells of wine, and apparently, there’s no right answer. But, it helps to have a good smell vocabulary. So they have little jars with different “essences” in them. You pick a jar, open it and smell, then try to guess the scent. I’m bad at this game. Everything is familiar, but nothing has a name. Interesting items included lemon, butter, and burnt toast. Yeah, I wondered how they got the “essence of burnt toast” too.



After Rochford, we headed to Yerring Farms, a small winery in the valley, known for holding back the release of its wines for several years until they mature, since they don’t produce as much as other wineries. There we learned about some of the process, including how where barrels are made (US vs. France), and how much barrels are burnt, contributes to the taste of wines. Reds are more likely to have more burnt barrels, as they need something to take the edge off the strong taste.



We also learned that the longer a wine waits before being opened, the less sharp the taste is, and the more chance it has for the other flavors to be noticeable and nuanced. The place itself was magnificent to look at.



Finally, we headed for Domain Chandon Australia, home of sparkling wines under the famous French name. We toured the facility, learning how a sparkling wine is made, and why it is no longer allowed to be called Champaign outside of that region. Real Champaign takes about 2 years to produce, as it has to go through two fermentation processes. In the second fermentation process, bottles are placed on a “riddling” rack, where they have to be turned one-quarter of a turn every few hours. And this one-quarter thing is a big deal. They mark the bottles to keep it right, and to be a professional riddler in France, you have to apprentice at it for something like 10 years before you can ever do it on your own. That might be why unemployment is high there – imagine what it takes to be a garbage collector, if it takes 10 years to turn a bottle.

Champaign / sparkling wine is generally made from a combination of other wines – e.g. Shiraz, pinot noir, sauvignon blanc (I can’t remember which are the right ones, but there are three popular ones). At Chandon, the owners mix more wines than I can remember (something like 140) from various sources before the final stock wine that will become their sparkling wine is created. Australia is known for making the only full red sparkling wine, so that’s the one I tried.



So why is it Champaign only in Champaign? Okay, there’s the normal answer everyone has – they want the rights to the name – the same thing is happening with cheeses lately. Fair enough. But, there’s a little more to it, and you can dispute it if you like. Real Champaign has two fermentation stages and takes 2 years to make one bottle, as I mentioned. But a bunch of opportunists figured they could short-circuit the process by just carbonating a bottle of wine, and save the year of second fermentation. Taste quality is reduced, and there was concern that Champaign would lose its true luster.

It was at Chandon that we learned our tour guide had actually studied viniculture in University (the study of wine and the wine-making process), and had worked at a vineyard for 18 months before becoming the tour guide. Then he told me about the part-time opening. I’m practicing my history, and trying to get my chauffer license.