Adelaide is one mighty strange town, one that's hard to describe. It has broad streets lined with buildings from decades ago, shaded by hundred year old trees that appear to be imported from small squares and parks in London. There's no sense of urgency on the streets, no feeling that this is where Big Things Happen. Adelaide does not feel remotely like any other Australian city, or any North American city for that matter. More than anything, it feels like a mid-sized English city. Or, more to the point, it feels like The Museum of International Style Skyscrapers.
But Adelaide is sophisticated without being pretentious, graceful without being pompous. And it has quite a few interesting cultural places to visit for a city its size. Today we visited a few of them--the Adelaide Botanic Gardens, the National Wine Center, and the Museum of Economic Botany-- before wandering down the Rundle Street Mall for light shopping. The day was interesting, with unexpected surprises.
Our first stop was the Botanic Garden (http://www.environment.sa.gov.au/botanicgardens/), in the northeast corner of Adelaide's square, planned city center. Adelaide Botanic Garden is an old style garden, planted in that Victorian style to show exotic plants and curiosities from around the world, which I find wholly appropriate for its setting. The newer collections continue that theme, with palm, cycad, and araucaria collections. I especially enjoyed the collection in the renovated, century old Palm House--after renovation in 1995, they converted the collections inside to those found in the dry warm southwestern corner of Madagascar. Those plants are very strange, with lots of spikes and thorns and bizarre growth habits. I really like plants from that area; they have an odd harsh masculinity.
National Wine Centre
Adjacent to the Botanic Garden is the National Wine Centre (http://www.wineaustralia.com.au/winecentre.cfm), we walked over there next. Both Chris and I want to see this as a great example of a big, splashy failure. The South Australian government spending $40 million to build and promote it, but the visitors didn't show up, and it's been losing huge sums of money. The wine industry isn't about to bail out the government, and right now it looks like it will close at the end of the month. This is a bit of a shame. We found it to be a great small museum housed in a flashy expensive building, saddled with a bad name and steep admission fee. By simply calling it the National Wine Museum and lowering the entrance fee from $11 to $5, there'd be quite a bit more interest I think.
We found the exhibits great, compelling. The exhibits occupy only three large rooms, with small hallways connecting them. The first room has a large map of Australia in the middle, with all fifty some-odd wine growing regions mapped out and a description of each of them and what they produce. The map is flanked on one side by a large video projection of vineyards through the season, and the other side has a long ten meter long display of the 32 most popular varieties of red and white wine grapes grown in Australia, along with the descriptions of each and how the grapes are used. We read them all.
This room connects through a small dark hall with two video projectors and a touch screen, where you can listen to winemakers give thirty second answers to common questions. It's perhaps the best example of touchscreens and interactivity in museums I've ever seen. We quizzed Prue Henschke quite a bit! We also 'talked' with Peter Lehmann, whose winery we visited two days ago, as well as a couple of other Australian winemakers. It was fascinating, and we learned quite a bit more about winemaking's more esoteric sides: the importance of trellising techniques, what the future is for the Australian wine industry, how important soils are.
After that, the second room had examples of winemaking equipment, from grape picking machines to crushers to bottling. It was mildly interesting, but what was even better was (yet again) another interactive display, where you went through the steps of making wine. You picked a variety (chardonnay, riesling, shiraz, cabernet), then answered questions in hope of winning a medal. Do you pick the wines in the evening, to prevent oxidation, or in the afternoon to prevent spoilage? Do you ferment chardonnay with juice and skins, or just the juice? Do you ferment shiraz at 17 to 21C, or at 7 to 17C--and do you ferment for 7 to 10 days, or 10 to 28 days? Do you add sulphur to prevent oxidation? Do you disgorge the wine to prevent tartar crystals from forming? So many questions, but there were hints that you could use to guide you along. Chris won a gold medal on his riesling first off, and I had to settle for BBQ wine with my shiraz... until I put my shiraz through malolactic fermentation and kept the fermentation at high temperatures for 7 - 10 days. It was great fun; afterwards we sniffed at the smell boxes (ones that worked!) where you can smell what corked wine tastes like, and other strange wine smells, then watched amusing TV commercials and promotional videos on Australian wine through the years.
After another dark hallway with video heads talking--this time about food and wine, frankly boring to us--we entered the last room, which was wine packaging and drinking. This was very interesting--Aussies have been dragging wine-in-a-bag around since the mid-1960's, and it started to make me think: why do Aussies prefer wine to beer?
For many things, Aussies like wine over beer: it's always wine at the barbie, wine at the beach, wine with TV. America is a beer drinking place: beer with the BBQ, beer at the beach, beer with TV. I wonder why that is--is it the higher temperatures here, which make refrigeration difficult? Is it that most areas of Australia are pretty good for growing wine grapes, so wine has always been readily available? Even here in South Australia, home to tens of thousands of German immigrants, wine is preferred over beer, and I haven't heard of a single German brewery (though Coopers is pretty yummy). It's an interesting question, especially given that the wine industry in Australia has only come onto the world scene in the 1980's, and the varieties and styles of wine popular today were not what was drunk 30 years ago.
Anyway, there was a pretty display of Riedel glasses--one for every wine variety!--as well as a large wall of labels from the 2000 vintage, and a large underlit wine tasting station that looked straight out of a trendy dot.com 1999 San Francisco bar. With not much to hold us there, we wandered over to the tasting room.
Our tickets got us some tastings, where for $2.50 more you can taste four 'premium' wines, or for $12.50 you can get 'super-premium' tastings... or $24.50 you can get 'ultra-premium' tastings. I choose the cheapie premium, because frankly I don't like many wines I taste. The tasting glasses (with small pours) came with a tray liner, entries for 'colour', 'nose', 'palate', and 'comments', and an explanation of the Australian 20 point wine scoring system. I didn't rate the wines, but here's what I wrote about my four wines (all South Australian):
2001 Redbank Pinot Gris, King Valley: pale, pale straw, citrusy and tropical, acid and not too sweet. Very pleasant, tasty. Might buy it.
2002 Perrini Estate sangiovese, McLaren Vale: a bit tannic. More like grenache, no seafood tastes. Boo! Fruity. Flabby. Nah, no buy.
2001 Coriole Sangiovese, McLaren Vale: black currant nose, oily, silky. Nah, no buy, but interesting.
2000 Tatachilla 'Keystone' Grenache Shiraz, McLaren Vale. black currant, a bit chocy [chocolate]. Palate slick, bit minty, milk chocolate, not much tannin, not long lasting. Smooth. No buy--blech [for shiraz... it's not what I'm looking for in shiraz]
I also was able to pick up a very cool polo shirt. Chris is way way jealous! The Wine Centre had closed its souvenir shop on the first floor, and moved the remaindered stock up to the tasting bar on the second floor... with polo and T-shirts! I'm glad I bought one--it'll probably be a collectors item in less than a month!
The Very Curious Museum of Economic Botany
Out of the National Wine Centre, we walked back into the Botanic Gardens, where I wanted to see the flowering Norfolk Island Pines and bunya pines. They were only male cones, but still, they were curious. But the Museum of Economic Botany was even more curious--a large 19th century concrete building, with exhibit cases from, well, the 19th century! The museum's main display was on seeds, a strange choice, where plant seeds from most major plant families were laid out under the wavy glass, with explanations about them and where their parent plants naturally grow. It was all very quaint, in the grand tradition of Victorian collections of oddities, and enjoyed the musty atmosphere immensely.
Rundle Street Mall
The Botanic Gardens, we soon found out, adjoin the very hip part of Adelaide. Hip in Adelaide terms means gentrified, and the former pubs are now oyster bars with alfresco dining under awnings. It seemed every building was Heritage listed, and had either noodles or cappuccino no the menu (sometimes both!) With the lace ironwork and the second story verandahs, parts of Rundle Street even felt like the French Quarter of New Orleans--though I suspect tits aren't flashed as much here.
We were getting hungry and a bit irritable at that point, though. It was going on 3:00, and for lunch we'd only had those four glasses of wine, so we dropped into the David Jones food hall. Yum yum yum... Chris bought an absolutely wonderful Mitchell sparkling shiraz (the Peppertree) for $30, which we would've bought at the winery if they hadn't been sold out... and then we tried to get a clerk's attention to buy some of the yummy food.
But none of the clerks would pay us any attention to buy their nice looking but a bit pricey pies and salads, so we headed back to the room. Chris just ended up going to Coles to get food for the next few days. It was a good call; there's a public holiday tomorrow, so Coles had marked down all their ready to eat meals to $2! So we feasted on a nice roast chicken with roasted veggies for dinner... and since we split it, our dinner only cost us a dollar each (that's 55 cents American)! It's kind of silly getting that thrill, especially after paying $30 (Australian) for a bottle of sparkling wine, but hey, cheap thrills can be fun.
I have also posted pictures from today at http://www.marmot.net/2002au/2002-10/log/default.htm?Log_2002-1006.htm, for those who are interested.