Australia Day 11 – wine and culture in Adelaide

Monday 19th December 2022

Today was another day of exploring the city and museums of Adelaide. First thing, we headed to the National Wine Centre of Australia, which is just past the botanical gardens. Instead of walking like yesterday, we took the tram – it’s free to travel within the central city area.

We’d booked a guided tour of the museum, which is only available at 11am each day so we had a little while to wait when we got there. I was surprised to learn that the National Wine Centre has its own small vineyard, at the back of the museum. It’s also got a huge wine cellar, which you can look down at from the balcony but is not open for the public to enter.

The museum itself has information and various exhibits about the process of making wine, particularly in Australia. I hadn’t realised that it was the Australians that introduced screw top wine bottles. It was an interesting museum but I wouldn’t bother with the guided tour. It costs $15 per person and only lasts half an hour, so we spent just as long in the museum on our own. I was expecting to be able to taste a small sample of wine at the end, but this wasn’t included. I think a much better option is to explore the museum on your own (which is free) then buy a wine flight or two from the tasting rooms at the end.

We walked through the botanical gardens, then continued to Gunbae Chicken & Beer (a Korean fried chicken restaurant) for lunch. They’ve got a few lunch specials, so we tried one of each of the available chicken options (a rice salad and a boneless chicken with slaw and pickled radish) along with a portion of kimchi pancakes. I loved the kimchi pancakes, and the chicken was lovely too – very crunchy coating and not at all greasy.

After lunch we walked to the Centre of Democracy, a small museum at the back of the State Library of South Australia. It’s free to enter and was fairly interesting to walk around, with the exhibits all focussing on the history of democracy in Australia.

We then continued to the nearby Migration Museum, which again is free to enter. I found this a fascinating museum, with various different exhibits covering the interesting and diverse history of migration in Australia, as well as the impact on the native aboriginals.

It was a hot day, so we felt in need of ice cream. Pete found a place called 48 flavours (because every day it has 48 different flavours of ice cream) – surely banana must be one of those flavours?!? Disappointingly the answer was no. So we moved on to the nearby Gelatissimo Gouger St. They also didn’t have Pete’s beloved banana, but he liked the look of the green apple sorbet, so had that with a scoop of strawberry. I had salted macadamia and cookie crumble. It was very good ice cream, the apple was lovely and tart and I particularly loved the salted macadamia.

We were near Chinatown so had a little wander around before going to Dumpling Bun for dinner. We ordered a few different dim sum dishes to share – a baked pork and seaweed cake, steamed chicken and mushroom buns, Shanghai soup dumplings, and pan fried pork and chive dumplings. The soup dumplings were amazing, as were the chicken buns (they were so light and fluffy with a lovely hint of ginger in the filling).

We walked back to the hotel and picked up a bottle of wine to share while we watched a couple of episodes of Money Heist before bed.