In any case, after three days in Clare, any suggestion along those lines would have been tantamount to relationship suicide. I’d figured out that we could probably visit two without too much drama.
The question was, under the circumstances, which two?
Which is where the research factor comes in.
Given the numerical constraints, I restricted my research to the places Mr Halliday had assigned five stars. That meant we were still looking at twenty-one wineries.
It was obvious other selection criteria were needed.
For a start, there was no way I wanted to pull into somewhere that was, even on Friday afternoon, likely to be packed, which ruled out some of the higher-profile establishments.
Many years ago I’d had the good fortune to come across a Shiraz from Rockford and had constantly been on the lookout for any of their wines ever since, with absolutely no success whatsoever. Since, as far as I can make out, their distribution doesn’t extend into our part of the world I figured Rockford was one of the two to visit.
I’d also run across a number of references to Thorn-Clarke as one of the rising stars of the Australian wine industry, and since it was close to the night’s accommodation I thought I’d found the second one.
But that was before I started looking at websites.
Once I’d finished going through those there was only one choice - Seppeltsfield.