A week of work

Apologies for so few posts this week. I had an insane week at the office here which I won't go into as it would likely bore you all. Needless to say, I am glad to be done with the week and am heading back to Singapore today. Thankfully there is a direct flight to Singapore from Adelaide. I watched a beautiful sunrise over the Adelaide hills this morning so was nice as a goodbye to this lovely city.

On Wednesday I had a morning of meetings and training and then took my team out on a team building. The team building consisted of visits to a few wineries, a chocolate shop, a jam shop, and then dinner in a great little town.

The first stop was to the Nepenthe winery. They had a small building for operations but a ton of land for their vineyards. Australia is just moving into their spring so things are just beginning to bloom. I am always interested in the age of the vines. They had a good variety young and old vines. I ended up buying some nice Pinot Gris from Nepenthe.

The next stop was to the Bird in Hand winery. Another relatively small winery. They are actually not named after the common phrase but actually named for a local mine. There are quite a few mines in the area and the the first vineyard for them was planted on the Bird in Hand mine property. We had fun tasting their wines and I have to say I liked most of their wine better than the first winery. I helped out the local economy and got some nice Merlot from them.

The next stop was to a local chocolate and candy factory. It was another small operation but they made everything on site and you could watch them doing it. I didn't make any purchases here but did have fun wandering around looking at everything. In South Australia they are big into chocolate frogs. They have different flavors and a bunch of different sizes. They also had a bunch of fairy floss - commonly known in the US as cotton candy.

Our last stop was to a town settled by Germans named Hahndorf. It is probably more of a village than a town. They have done a nice job of maintaining the original feel of the town by keeping the buildings as the original structures instead of building modern buildings.

The shops are all local and most only sell locally made products. This is what most of them look like from the inside:

We finished the day with dinner at a local pub called the Hahndorf Inn. Traditional German fare with some Australian twist thrown in.