In the long run, persistence paid off and he ended up with a dozen. After the saga that brought them there I was determined to have a taste. Persistence on my part eventually paid off, and very nice it was.

Nice enough to have Rockford filed away as a label to look for when I found myself in one of the more upmarket bottle shops in a capital city. Since there are, according to Halliday, only five retail outlets nation-wide it’s hardly surprising that the sighting count remained at a firm zero.

Fine, I thought. We’re off to the Barossa. I’m going to Rockford, and on a Friday afternoon in early November 2008 there we were.

Rockford Window

First impressions were of a building that fitted remarkably with Hughesy’s mental image of a couple of Belgian farm houses that featured prominently in the Battle of Waterloo, and when we walked into the tasting room we found the sort of cobwebbed charm that you can’t manufacture unless you outlay vast quantities of money.

Rockford Ceiling

The actual details of the visit are already over in the Barossa section of the relevant travelogue, but after a very pleasant tasting session we were about to head off when I asked about the mailing list.

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