The beautiful Hunter Valley!

Tim is on the right, Keith our tour guide is the one who you think looks like a tour guide

Trying to look as tourist as possible!--Our last wine tasting

Just a taste of our sophomoric antics

Looked like a good place for a prom picture!

So we just got back from a long day in Wine Country--Hunter Valley. Not too far from Sydney, about a 2 hour drive. We booked with a tour company and it was 7 of us with 5 other travelers. Let me say, I bet they hated us the first 3 hours of the trip. It was 8 in the morning, most of us were hungover-some still buzzed, and we were the typical loud, crewed college kids that you pray aren't on your trip to wine country.

We visited 4 winerys and had wine tastings at all of them. The tastings were included with the trip and we had the cellar to ourselves. Once everyone had a bit of wine in them, the loud, crewed college kids weren't so bad and the group actually starting coming together. The adults realized that it was pretty funny to make drunk college kid jokes and we thought they were funny too. For an example, throughout the first wine tasting RJ was chewing gum! When we got to the second one our server was a tad insulted and asked if he'd had it in all day, which he replied 'well yeah, no wonder all those wines kinda tasted the same!' I proceeded to ask the server if she had any wine that would pair well with Trident White.

One guy we meet liked us from the beginning, his name was Tim. Tim is a financial adviser from Napa Valley who has winery clients. Lets just say that Tim was the man, from the get go he was making bets on which one of us would have to be carried, and boldly proclaiming to anyone who would listen that he was our chaperon. At one winery he told the servers that he was our professor and we were on a field trip, from then on he was known as 'The Professor'. The Professor actually imparted us with some great wine knowledge, and some what I would call 'man knowledge' he was loving it, living vicariously though us.

Some other cool places we visited included the Blue Tongue Brewery where we had lunch and did a flight of beers. We also stopped at a place called the 'Smelly Cheese Shop' where we had some cheese tastings and let me tell you, it was amazing. We had some great blue cheese and some amazing feta. The feta wasn't the crumbly feta that you're used to in the states, it was more liquid and was infused with anything from pesto to red peppers and sun-dried tomatoes. We also stopped at a chocolate shop and had some fudge, but I was less enamored with the sweets shop than anything else.

All in all it was a great day and I think i learned some cool stuff about Australian wine. I was bummed we didn't get to tour any of the wine making process, but free glasses of wine is good enough i suppose. I don't claim to have the pallet of a wine connoisseur (read Dr. Bres) but I can for sure tell the difference between a white and red!