Day 15: Coonabarabran > Orange
Saturday morning's game plan had us leaving around seven-thirty, which we didn't quite manage, but we were back out on the highway just after eight, and the route to Dubbo via Gilgandra, heading in a general westerly direction, delivered a side on view of the Warrumbungles before veering increasingly towards the south.
Through Gilgandra just after nine we thought about breakfast, but opted to continue onwards with an extended break in Dubbo when no obvious options presented themselves as we headed through the home of the Coo-ee.
Finding a parking spot behind Dubbo's Woolworths Supermarket wasn't too difficult, and an inspection of the options on the main street brought us to Mr Bean's Coffee Emporium for a substantial breakfast, before hitting the road again via Wellington and Molong en route to Bloodwood Wines, which is about ten kilometres north of Orange.
The iPad showed it's value as a navigational device, delivering us almost exactly to the entrance of the vineyard, rather impressive since the we're on our way, anticipated ETA between twelve and twelve-thirty phone call suggested that the entrance was easily missed.
That phone call had also indicated they were on (hopefully) their last day of picking, and we passed the pickers, obviously on their lunch break, on the way in, sighting a figure that seemed to be the right vintage to be Mr Doyle disappearing into a hilltop vineyard block.
Changes to the previous travelogue setup and the need to play catch up when you've found yourself about four days behind the pace militate against throwing a detailed description of the next few hours here, and the reader will find discussion of the oenological side of the visit, along with tasting notes, over on The Wine Pages.
Because, for a start, we were looking at something different from our usual modus operandi when visiting a vineyard, which involves turning up, having a taste (and hopefully a bit of a natter to someone) and hopping into the car to move on to the next place.
In this case, however, we'd already sampled most of the range, and there were various catch up factors involved in whatever nattering was going to take place, so I'd neglected to add any other wineries in the area to the schedule.
A couple of points, though.
If you're planning a visit, be aware that the By Appointment in Halliday and other sources of information is exactly that. Arrive for a tasting and you'll be guided through the range, and if there's a session in progress when you arrive, you'll be cooling your heels on the verandah until the current one is finished.
That's not necessarily a bad thing, at least as far as Hughesy's concerned.
For a start the views from the winery are fairly spectacular, and you can take the time to consider the effort that's gone into transforming what Steve Doyle has described as a windswept hillside desert (or words to that effect) into the vineyard vista before you.
Secondly, unlike the regular tasting room experience, you've got the undivided attention of your guide for the whole of the session, rather than having him or her heading backwards or forwards between two, three or four groups of tasters to satisfy two, three or four sets of insatiable curiosities.
It also means that having made an appointment you're likely to be keeping someone else waiting if you're late.
In any case Rhonda was in the middle of a session when we arrived, and interrupted it to greet us and point out that Steve was either in the winery or in the Riesling block, and had suggested we track him down when we arrived.
That wasn't as difficult as it might have been since the figure we'd sighted on the way in was now involved in putting newly picked fruit through the de-stemmer.
Madam set off with the camera, while I stood around and watched, and with that particular lot of Shiraz de-stemmed it was back up into the Riesling block, where a few Cabernet vines were in the process of being picked by the winemaker himself.
Everything on the property is picked by hand, and, by picking these half dozen or so buckets, Steve was saving himself several multiples of $6.40. That's a significant factor when you're looking at the output from a winery that does all the picking by hand, since the buckets aren't exactly huge.
Start with whatever it cost to produce the grapes, add that cost per bucket and then throw in all the little extra costs along the way, and there's no way you're going to be churning out vast quantities of sub-$10 wines if you're dealing with handpicked fruit.
Readers will undoubtedly find further reflections along those lines over in the Rants section of the site and at The People's Republic of The Little House of Concrete.
There was plenty of photographic action for Madam, and plenty of points of interest for Hughesy, including a taste of the berries out in the vineyard and samples of the still very young 2011 wines, and, eventually, we finished with a brief taste, where I went for the Schubert Chardonnay and the Pinot Noir rather than the other wines I'd already tried.
We also took on a bit of advice re. Wines that might go down well in Sunday night's most likely restaurant venue which we expected to be Chinese with Mess Stagg.
Along the way a group of prospective tasters had arrived unannounced, while the scheduled crew had been running late, and I'd wanted to hang around till Rhonda had finished with the customers before heading off, which meant that it was much later than intended when we made our escape.
Having booked into the evening's accommodation, it was a matter of deciding whether to walk or drive downtown for dinner, and, with hindsight, driving might have been the better option.
For a start, eateries are fairly thin on the ground along Orange's main drag (or at least that part of it we wandered along) and anything in a side street wasn't going to be advertising it's presence with tables on the footpath in Orange in autumn with the overnight minimum diving into single figures.
We'd been pointed towards a wood-fired pizza operation, which turned out to be booked out (an example of why driving may have helped) but as it turned out there was a Thai place directly opposite that turned out to be quite satisfactory. from there it was back to the motel and, predictably, to bed prior to an early departure before reunions in Canberra.