After the beautiful meetings, we leave Victoria for South Australia and Adelaïde. The air is hotter and it is dryer when we arrive. After a short walk in the city including a visit to Adelaïde museum which hosts an amazing photography exhibition showing the winners of the National Photographic competition about flora and fauna of Australia. It also has a section dedicated to aboriginal culture and art as well as a natural history part full of stuffed animals. We are heading out afterwards to the Barossa Valley.

South Australia by its sunshine and rather low rainfall, its hilly landscape and the mild ocean climate is perfect for cultivating grapes and thus to produce delicious wines. We are working on a vineyard for 2 weeks at Smallfry Wines, which is using biodynamy, you can find out more here.

At the beginning we were supposed to go work in a huge sheep farm and so when the date came closer we went and check out where the farm was exactly. Turns out the farm isn't in the woofing network, even when the contact email mentionned « wwoof » and that when looking for it on the net with the farm name, we found a facebook page for a huge industrial, not at all organic, farm. We therefore write to our host ahead of time to ask why he is not on the woofing website and to let him know that we probably wouldn't wish to come as his farm would not really fit our project. The email didn't exist anymore and came back undelivered ! We don't know what we escaped from, but we are pretty glad we did !

Lucky for us the woofing network in Australia is great and even only with two days notice, explaining what happened to us, we are receiving a lot of positive answers and encouragements or even references to other hosts when they're not available themselves.

This is how we arrive at Wayne and Suzi's where we stay in a little house in the middle of one of their vineyards. The soil is very sandy, it is pretty surprising. Some vines here are over 100 years old and there is a great variety of different grapes. Our first job is to taste the wine ! Let's just say Tom is pretty happy about it ! We taste and then fill the barrels with wine from another one. Impressive the amount that evaporates from the barrels during the fermentation ! The angel's share as we say is huge, these particular angels are certainly pretty tipsy !

Well, it is not all wine tasting during our stay here of course. There is invasive weed coming from South Africa that we need to eradicate, young vine plants that need breathing room, new shoots to guide onto the steel lines, space to free up and weeper-snipping to do, no time to get bored that is for sure !

We work hald days and the rest of the time we are free. Some tastings, the car sale (at last!), working on the articles and videos, preparing the broadbeans harvested on the veggie patch in front of the house, a bicycle ride to get some fresh beers and diners at Wayne and Suzi's are making the days fly by (too) swiftly.

It is very nice to be able to stay in one place for a little while and get back something like a daily life, though we are also happy when the time comes to hit the road again, starting back in Adelaide.

Videos made on-site:

Worm Tea in biodynamic agriculture

Broadbeans preparation