Back in April when I went to Melbourne to catch up with my friends, we took the opportunity to spend a day driving out to a winery and relaxing in the sun, thereby allowing me to complete yet another 52 in 52. Our method of selecting a winery was slightly unorthodox, and as I wrote in my original post detailing the trip down south, we played a game to select where we’d go:

When travelling in groups, no matter how small or large, choosing somewhere to eat and drink wine can be a complicated affair. Julie told us about a story from a trip she had previously taken, where they would randomly choose left or right at intersections and see where they would end up. We decided to incorporate this idea into our current trip by choosing a random number, which would then form the basis of which winery we would stop at. We chose the number 5, and after locating the 5th winery sign we arrived at a small little building by the side of the road.

A woman came out to greet us, and informed us that not only did they not produce wine anymore (they were now a cooking school), they were doing filming that day and thus they were  closed regardless. We were a little disappointed, but rather than try and randomly choose the next winery we asked the lady to choose a number between 1 and 10. She chose 8, so using the map of all wineries in the Yarra Valley region, we located the 8th winery and were on our way again.

Manadala Wines was the winner.

Mandala Winery

I won’t go into the full detail of the day (I would essentially just be repeating myself, please click here if you’re interested in reading my recap of the day); instead I’ll just share a couple of my favourite photos from the day:

Traditional English Pork Pie

Duck Rilette with a pear jelly

A glass of their amazing wine overlooking the vineyards

All in all it was a fantastic day, and I’m so glad I decided to add this to the list. This is definitely something I’ll be doing again with friends!