The road through Coolah was another pleasant drive and it was four-thirty when we pulled in to the motel in Gunnedah, timing that had Madam heading out the door soon after our arrival to photograph the sunset.
There was a suitable viewing option a block or three away from the motel, so she decided to walk, a decision that didn’t quite take the speed with which night falls into account, and I’d just finished tapping out a bit of travelogue on the iPad when I realised that the shades of night were well and truly with us before Madam had returned.
I spent a relatively anxious few minutes before the return was effected, and once the reunification was effected it was time for dinner. There were a number of options, and with the benefit of hindsight we might have opted for the Indian down the street rather than Wild Orchards across the road.
There wasn’t much wrong with Wild Orchards on the food side of things, but a glance at the wine list revealed a distinct lack of anything interesting to drink if you’re trying to stay away from the usual big corporate suspects and disinclined to shell out big bucks for the upper reaches of the Penfolds portfolio.
Of course, there’s every chance that the story would have been similar regardless of which dining option we’d chosen.
There are reasons why what I’d term the usual suspects turn up on restaurant wine lists over and over again, and those reasons are probably more pronounced away from the major centres, and there’s probably an even stronger tendency in areas where the economy’s being propped up by the mining boom and there are a number of people passing through town on mining-related business.
Gunnedah certainly seemed to be pretty well endowed when it came to dining options, given the fact that population-wise it’s around the same size as Bowen, and one can’t help but wonder why that should be.