Wine Tour

Today we went on a Chillout Travel wine tour of the Yarra Valley wineries. We were picked up at 9:30 am and returned about 5:00 pm, so it was a full day of wining.
It takes about an hour to drive from Melbourne to the Yarra Valley.
There were six on the wine tour - 3 McKeagues, 1 young woman from Korea, and 2 even younger men from Melbourne. Our tour guide was Bec, who has been in Melbourne 5 years but was originally from Germany. I know her English is excellent and assume her German also is - and they trained her about the wine tasting thing.
The first vineyard we went to was De Bortoli. We started off with a sparkling white, then (after purchasing a cheese selection - my favourite was the goat cheese in olive oil and garlic) we went through the white wines, the red wines (I skipped them) and the sweet wines. We ended up buying their Show Muscat.
We moved on to Train Trak from there, and did the same drink through the available wines (but they didn't have muscat and port). There we bought their sparkling Pinot Chardonnay. We'll drink that one while we are here - we'll take it to a bring your own bottle restaurant. Then we had lunch at Train Trak - antipasta, wood-fired pizza (good thing I like it) and latte or tea.
Then on to another vineyard, and through another selection of wines - this time the winery was Yering Station and the wine we purchased was their tawny port.
But we weren't done yet - out last stop was at Domaine Chandon. There we first had a little lesson on the making of sparkling wine (Domaine Chandon being an Australian branch of Moet et Chandon)and then had a glass of sparkling wine (full instead of the usual taste - Dave had the basic brut, I had the rose brut and Sean had the Cuvee)with bread, chutney and cheese.
After all the wine the van was full of tired people on the ride back to Melbourne.
We had a meal out just down the street, and are back in the hotel again quite early - Dave's already fallen asleep, so I guess he'll be up again at 5 am tomorrow.
Re the photo I commented that you could tell it was winter because the vines are leafless and look dead - but no, you can tell it is winter because the grass is green. In the summer the grass is dead!