HONEYMOON VINEYARD AND ROMNEY PARK

My friend Rose Le saved me from too much blues yesterday and arrived in a van full of mates to carry me away over the range to visit the Honeymoon Vineyard and winery of Jane Bromley and Hylton McLean at Echunga.

Rod Short drove across from his Romney Park vineyard and winery at Hahndorf to meet us here at the halfway Honeymoon house. We sat back to drink and marvel at the decade of wines these two bold and brilliant little businesses can now put on the table.

Between them, these cool-country wineries grow and make ultra-fine  Chardonnay, Pinot noir and Shiraz for brilliant sparkling and still wines.

The Quaker and temperance advocate  John Barton Hack planted the first vines outside the city of Adelaide just over that ridge at his Echunga Gardens farm in 1839, only three years after the colony of South Australia was declared a province of Great Britain.  

This rich upland country is where the Peramangk people had lived for many millennia before they were killed by summary brutality or slow white man disease or somehow assimilated into the culture of their coastal neighbours, the Kuarna.

After a solid six-hour sesh at the snifters: L-R: Tracy Simpson, Rod Short, hosts Jane Bromley and Hylton McLean, Scott Simpson, Rose Le, the author, and Katy Phan ... a truly memorable and delicious day it was, although I did find this strange shred of hillsbilly gothness in my camera this morning:

 all photographs by Philip White