It’s raining in Adelaide. So it only makes sense to spend the day indoors, right?

How does a winery (or several) sound?

Groovy Grape offers wine tours of nearby Barossa Valley. We plan to visit four wineries today and sample around 7 types of wine at each… you do the math. Our rainy day just got a whole lot better.

En route to the first winery we stop at a ‘whispering wall’ — it was not intentionally constructed as such, but the acoustics work so that if you speak at one end of the wall, anyone on the other end can hear you clearly.

During the drive one of our dynamic tour guides, Julian, leads a round of games. We write down the name of a famous person and stick it to our seat mate’s forehead so they can’t see it, but the rest of us can. They ask us YES or NO questions until they correctly guess their identity.

The names are a little hard to read, but Matthias has Albert Einstein and Julian has Adam Sandler.

We arrive at winery numero uno — the very posh Jacob’s Creek.

We may be in a fancy winery, but several of us still have our celebrity names taped to our forehead from the van game.

I particularly enjoy this shiraz rosé.

Our next stop is Kies Family Wines. It’s not nearly as high-end as Jacob’s Creek, but it’s homey and approachable. The kind of place you can relax and spend an hour or two chatting with the co-owner behind the counter while sampling their offerings.

May I introduce the perfect accessory for your tour: a wine glass necklace. Tour guide Julian proudly shows it off.

Ayumi, Michelle, and Matthias (all alums from our Groovy Grape Great Ocean Road & Grampians tour) enjoy their wine samples from Kies.

Here’s Dan, Matthias, and me.

After we finish at Kies, our tour guide Luke (we have three tour guides today) prepares a tasty BBQ featuring various meats: kangaroo, steak, sausage, and chicken kabobs. And a little salad to balance out all those animals.

This is me and John, another passenger from our Great Ocean Road & Grampians tour.

We arrive at our third winery of the day: Richmond Grove.

Ayumi, Matthias, and Thomas act as the three wise monkeys: speak no evil, see no evil, hear no evil.

And we move on to our fourth and final winery of the day, Seppeltsfield.

Here’s Michelle, Anna, and tour guide Luke. Since Luke is driving, he sips on a non-alchoholic raspberry cordial. At this point I’d gladly trade my wine for his glass.

A little fruit, cheese, and crackers to cleanse the palate.

The top shelf stuff… literally:

We didn’t let the rain put a damper on our day in Barossa Valley. In fact, we all return to Adelaide in GREAT moods.

I’ll leave you with a short video promo that Groovy Grape put together using my photos from the trip:

Many thanks to Groovy Grape Getaways for hosting my Barossa Valley Wine Tour. All opinions are my own.