Shannonvale Winery

We're here! After a short bus ride we arrived at the tourisy Port Douglas, where Tony Woodall (one of the owners) picked us up. Just before I go on to talk a bit about the winery, I think it necessary to recount out last hostel experience. It really derserves a mention. After our 5 star hostel experiences this one kinda let us down: in the middle of nowhere, only drunk locals in sight, filth and graffiti in the rooms,mould in the bathrooms. Management didn't really know what they were doing... they unlocked and came into the twin room Elena and I were staying up, in the middle of the night, to ask if we had checked in...??? In the morning we thought we'd have breakfast at the hostel. Big mistake. We ordered French toast. Big mistake. The guy behind the bar looked like he'd just gotten up, didn't know where anything was, couldn't count the change properly and gave us deep-fried, fat dripping, soggy bread thinking he could get away with it. We helped ourselves to free cereal and left the "toast".
So the winery. It's pretty rustic. And similarly to the farms I worked at in France, the owners don't seem to get any free time at all. We've only been here for a day and half, but they seem to have customers pretty much all the time. People come here to buy wine mainly, so they taste the 12 varieties and then make up their mind. We haven't tasted them all yet, only 2 at the moment. There are table wines: jaboticaba, ginger, mango, lychee, passionfruit, grapefruit.. and ports: jaboticaba, orange, purple mangosteen, black sapote. And no, I don;t know what all the fruits are yet. We've been taken around the orchard briefly and shown the lime and kumquat trees, which are the only ones with fruit at the moment - we will have to pick it at some point. Trudie, Tony's wife, also showed us around the veggie garden, it was amazing: aubergines, green beans, tomatoes, celery.. and she gave us wild rocket and spinach to taste. Also warned us about green ants, which in her words, can be "quite uncomfortable" if you brush against their nest. Yikes.
We're defintely going to come across a little too much wildlife for my liking.. a bat just got into the bathroom, as we speak.
So what else.. We labelled some wine bottles in the morning with a snazzy labelling machine, had pie for lunch, and washed a bucket full of limes, then started squeezing them with another snazzy machine but there was a power cut so had to do most of the job by hand. The power cut lasted a while so we were quite limited as to things to do. We went for a bike ride, but the river had overflowed on the road. And then cooked our dinner by candlelight, had some wine.. pretty romantic stuff!
I think we're working in the winery tomorrow, filtering wine or something.
Bottoms up!