Team Adelaide Hills and McLaren Vale: Day 1 - Wine & Spirits Magazine

Sommelier Scavenger Hunt

Team Adelaide Hills and McLaren Vale: Day 1

adapted from W&S Team • August 15, 2015

Michael Madrigale (Boulud Sud), Michelle Bisceglia (Blue Hill) and Josiah Baldivino (Bay Grape)—Team Napa Valley 2014—arrived in Adelaide, South Australia, on Friday, immediately setting out on a search for shiraz and grenache in Adelaide Hills and McLaren Vale. Bisceglia sent this post from their first day down under. —ed.

We started off the day with a benchmark tasting of Adelaide Hills shiraz—37 different shiraz, all blind. Our take home: fresh!! The wines are really fresh and it was pretty easy for us to choose a top three together. We are feeling pretty excited about the region!

Having the only day with free time (and just three hours of free time), we decided to go to a national wildlife park to see some kangaroos and koalas. It’s cold and raining, but it was so worth it.

We had lunch (washed our hands first!!) and then headed to taste wines at Murdoch Hill. We tasted shiraz, pinot meunier, chardonnay and pinot noir. The wines were killer and we are stoked. Our discussions constantly revolve around grape varietal: which should we choose? What’s Australian terroir defined by? We also got to smell crushed fresh eucalyptus leaves and realized why certain aussie shiraz have that menthol thing going on…

Michael from Murdoch Hill

We finished the day with a great lamb dinner with a few winemakers. We had Australian versions of shiraz, pinot meunier, fiano (yes, fiano!) and a few others. We started to fall asleep standing up so we went home to dream about kangaroos and tasmanian devil.—Michelle Bisceglia

This story appears in the print issue of jan 2019.
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David Paradela
Associate Editor

David joined Wine & Spirits in 2021 after immersing himself in the world of wine at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Originally from Boston, he graduated from Boston University with a degree in English and completed a master’s degree in Publishing and Writing from Emerson College in 2021. Prior to working at the magazine, he served as an editor and staff writer for the music blog Sound of Boston and worked in scientific publishing. Aside from wine, he loves basketball, arguing about Taylor Swift’s best album, and everything Greta Gerwig touches.

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Corey Warren moved to New York in 2015—fifteen years too late to join The Strokes—after earning a degree at Cornell in Comparative Literature. He started polishing glasses at Betony and threw himself into the restaurant world. Later, while a captain at Aquavit, he began working part time in the Wine & Spirits tasting department. Now, in addition to running tastings, he serves as critic for the wines of the Loire, Southern France, Argentina and South Africa. Corey likes almost anything bubbly, from Miller High Life, the Champagne of beers, to Champagne, the Champagne of Champagne, but he’ll drink anything once, and loves finding unique wines.

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Since Tara Q. Thomas joined Wine & Spirits in 1997, she’s traveled the wine world from Argentina to Australia. A graduate of the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, with more than 20 years of experience in the food and wine world, Tara puts her culinary knowledge to use as W&S’s resident food critic, and is the critic for the wines of Austria, Germany, Eastern Europe, Argentina, and the Mediterranean. She’s particularly enthusiastic about the wines of Greece, where she once lived and cooked. Outside of W&S, Tara has authored two books, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Wine Basics and The Pocket Idiot’s Guide to Wine; contributed to the Oxford Companion to Cheese as well as Oxford’s forthcoming volume on spirits; and writes a wine column for Culture: The Word on Cheese.

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Patricio Tapia
Senior Correspondent

After graduating with a degree in journalism from the Universidad de Chile in Santiago, Patricio Tapia attended Bordeaux University in France, where he studied for a diploma in wine tasting and winemaking. Since then, he has visited wine regions around the world and authored several books, including his annual Descorchados, a Chilean wine guide; The Wines of Colchagua Valley; TodoVino and Wines for Great Occasions. Tapia is also the South American correspondent for The Oxford Companion to Wine, The World Atlas of Wine and Oz Clarke’s Pocket Wine Book. For the past three years, he’s been a host on the El Gourmet channel in South America. At Wine & Spirits, Tapia is the critic for the wines of Argentina, Chile and Spain, and regularly contributes articles on these regions.