Wednesday, 24 August
Regardless of how many times you're told that this is your bit of the trip, for some reason you can bank on a can I just do this little bit first? Fortunately my plans for the tasting trail allowed a degree of flexibility so we headed to Cape Naturaliste for photographic purposes that would have required most of the morning to explore to their maximum potential. It was just after ten when we found our way onto Caves Road, where we passed what an uninformed observer might have regarded as an unconscionable number of wineries before we turned left at Lenton Brae.
Nowadays, when we're heading for wine country, the first thing Hughesy does is to check Mr Halliday's ubiquitous reference tome, and come up with a list of the establishments James has rated with five stars. Earlier in the year, our visit to the Granite Belt, where the single five star wasn't open at the time I had to look further afield, and with Capel Vale as the only one in the Geographe region the day before that had also left things cut and dried.
Margaret River, on the other hand, is a different kettle of fish with the count running into the forties, a number that would need more than two and a half days to do properly. Not all of them are open to the public, but even when the ones that aren't had been eliminated from the list we were still left with a week to ten days' solid tasting if we were going to visit all of them. Experience, however, suggested a couple of options when it came to sorting things out.
For a start, it made sense to head for places that offer freight free delivery to the east coast (and a surprising number do, provided you're buying a dozen bottles, so that didn't help a great deal).
A better organizing principle involved separating iconic establishments you felt obliged to visit from the rest and casting the eye around for the odd establishment that looked like it had something to offer in the way of quirky independent producer status.
The icons weren't too hard to figure - Cullen, Brookland Valley, Leeuwin Estate, Vasse Felix and Cape Mentelle were obvious must visits, and I could've added Howard Park/Madfish and Xanadu to that list had I not suspected they'd attract significant numbers of coach-borne visitors. Hughesy sees the presence of tour coaches as a definite minus when it comes to serious sampling.
Round the list off with, say, half a dozen other interesting establishments and we'd have a list that was comfortably doable.
Being fresh on Day One, I figured, we could probably get around half of the dozen or so places I'd listed. Travelling along Caves Road would take us to Lenton Brae and Brookland Valley before we diverted to Hay Shed Hill for lunch, with Ashbrook, Vasse Felix and maybe one more before we headed for the accommodation in downtown Margaret River.
Madam wanted to visit Lake Cave on Day Two, but provided we could get on the first tour that would leave an easy run through Leeuwin Estate, Voyager Estate, Stella Bella and maybe a fourth, while Friday would be abbreviated by the need to travel north so we'd save Cullen till last, with the possibility of further strings being added to the bow if time and taste buds permitted before a 2 p.m. departure for Singleton Beach on the southern outskirts of Perth's metropolitan sprawl.