Oceania

Welcome to Oceania

Oceania is just a fancy name for all of those scattered island nations stranded in the Pacific Ocean without a continent to call home, most notably Australia and New Zealand.

Australia New Zealand

Around The World in 4 Months and a Day

After a long absence from traveling (and thus blogging) due to some pesky knee surgery issues for Mark, we’ve embarked on our longest trip ever… 4 months and a day. We left Dallas on January 14, and ‘holding thumbs’ that all goes well, we will return on May 15. The first and last legs of our trip are to Whistler, British Columbia, Canada (about 70 miles north of Vancouver) where we are building a home. This is our 3rd OneWorld…

You Say Syrah, I Say Shiraz

When the Syrah (See-ra) grape was introduced from France into Australia in 1832, it flourished so quickly that it spread across the nation and established a home in virtually every wine region. In Australia it became known as Shiraz (Shih-RAHZ) and soon became the favorite grape. As much Shiraz is produced in the country today as every other red variety put together, and its diversity of style has greatly expanded. Recent trends have been away from the ‘bigger is better’…

Mind Your Beeswax and You’ll Get More Wine

About 100,000 beehives are trucked from the east coast to South Australia during the almond blossom season annually because bees have been proven to increase almond yields. So when Cullen wineries wanted to improve the reliability of the chardonnay yields from its Margaret River vineyard, their winemaker thought that bees might provide the solution. A hive was installed on site and the bees were trained to seek out chardonnay flowers. The experiment saw an increase in the yield of eight…

How Old is Wine?

Quiz for today: Who was drinking wine first? Egyptians? Armenians? Chinese? Margaret River-ites? Well, not to say future discoveries couldn’t shed new light on the subject, but the evidence so far points to the Chinese. In 2004, wine residue was found in 9,000 year old pottery in China (see Patrick Edward McGovern “the Indiana Jones of Ancient Ales, Wines and Extreme Beverages”). The fermented beverage consisted of fruit, honey, and rice. An ancient wine cellar inside a cave in the side of a…

First Stop Australia

A big thanks to our Aussie friends, James and Kate, for directing us to head to the Margaret River Wine Region straightaway after landing in Perth… we’ve had a lovely few days here.   First a little geography… Australia is almost the same size as the contiguous U.S.   Western Australia (WA) is one of the six states of Australia, which also has several territories. Perth and Margaret River are both in the southwestern tip of Western Australia.     WA…