Rieslings to be happy

By MELANIE BALL

Chocolate cake melting in my mouth and a hound at my feet, I raise my glass of sparkling riesling, the grape for which the region is famous, and drink to the Clare Valley.

Raising glasses is popular here. One hundred and thirty kilometres north of Adelaide you can swirl and swallow a dozen wine varieties in 32 wineries. You can also eat scrumptious food and stay in historic retreats.

The Clare Valley is five sub-valleys draped in pastures, crisscrossed with vines and dotted with towns whose tallest buildings are two-storey pubs that quenched thirsty farmers and miners more than a century ago. Farmhouse ruins suggest failed endeavours. Galleries, antique shops and restaurants celebrate new ones.

Shortly after the South Australian colony was founded in 1836, pastoralists pushed civilisation's limit north to this fertile district. Englishman John Horrocks founded Penwortham, the first village north of Gawler, and Edward Gleeson laid out the second, which he named Clare after the Irish county of his birth.

Fewer than 100 people lived around these settlements in 1842, but after copper was found in Kapunda and Burra, inns and small villages sprouted along the ore route to St Vincent Gulf. When the mining boom slowed, there was wool, wheat, fruit and grapes to sustain the copper towns.

The Clare Valley's gateway is Auburn, one of its oldest and prettiest towns.

C.J. Dennis, author of Sentimental Bloke, was born here and a festival celebrates his birthday each September. A pen, a self-portrait and early works are among memorabilia the local National Trust holds.

As a child, Dennis visited his fearsome grandfather and pious maiden aunts in Mintaro, now a heritage-listed hamlet. Cottages and shops built of world-renowned Mintaro slate face streets lined with eucalypts and gnarled Moreton Bay figs.

Mintaro slate has been quarried for paving, flooring and billiard tables for 150 years. After shooting his Australian record of 4137 in 1931, billiards champion Walter Lindrum congratulated the Mintaro Slate Company for its single-slate table top.

Compared with Mintaro's delightful village atmosphere, nearby Martindale Hall provides a very different perspective of early pastoral life.

Some believe an English lady agreed to come to Australia and marry Edmund Bowman if he built her a house comparable with hers, but reneged when the house was complete. Others suggest Edmund just wanted a house befitting an 1870s country squire. Whatever the truth, Martindale Hall cost £30,000 when the average Adelaide home cost £500. Now visitors can tour the mansion that starred as Appleyard College in the Australian film Picnic at Hanging Rock, or enjoy a night of landed-gentry life by eating a formal meal in the elegant dining room and then sweeping upstairs to bed.

From earliest days the Clare Inn was marketed as a refuge. In 1849 it promoted itself as a place where newlyweds could "appreciate the sweets of their honeymoon in all its pleasing delights."

Modern accommodation is as diverse as regional wines. Tateham's Restaurant and Guest House occupies Auburn's general store (c. 1863), stables, bluestone barn and storekeeper's quarters. Resurrected from near-ruin, Thorn Park Country House in Sevenhill is an exotic paradise of roses and river red gums, open fires and heated towel rails, pre-dinner drinks and heavenly breakfasts.

One hundred and fifty years of vine planting and wine-making are behind the Clare Valley's vineyards. The oldest winery is Sevenhill Cellars, established with Rhine Valley cuttings in 1851 by Jesuits to produce sacramental wine for the young colony and to export.

Sevenhill still makes most of Australia's altar wine and exports to South-east Asia.

Brother John May, the seventh wine-maker, leads guided tours (by arrangement), or you can wander through the century-old buildings and into the underground cellars paved with Mintaro slate. Old slate tanks installed by founding wine-maker Brother Schreiner remain as part of the winery's history - and because they are too heavy to dismantle.

A short drive from the vineyard where God has a hand in the wine-making brings you to one where lesser mortals protects the vines.

Kangaroos were eating thousands of dollars worth of grapes each year before Dave and Diana Palmer discovered the animals disliked political broadcasts. Now speakers and a radio tuned to the ABC are Skillogalee vineyard's first line of defence.

Skillogalee's 140-year-old stone farmhouse has a cosy kitchen tasting room and space for eating Skillogalee's renowned food. The farmhouse was built by Cornish miner John Trestrail, a religious man who disapproved of drinking,

I am on the veranda with Max, the resident springer spaniel, when I realise why Oscar Wilde penned those immortal words: "I can resist everything except temptation."

Someone must have offered him Skillogalee's rich chocolate whisky cake with raspberry coulis and King Island cream.

* For Clare Valley Tourist Information Centre, ph (00618) 8842 2131 or fax (00618) 8842 1117.