Alison

Touring Tasmania – River Tamar Wineries

It was Maddy’s Birthday today and a day out at the River Tamar Wineries was on the itinerary. After letting them have a bit of a lie in from their late night, we set off around 11 am. We took the West Tamar Highway and our first stop was Grindelwald. From the name you can would be correct in thinking it was modelled on a Swiss village. Built in 1989 by Roelf Vos, a Dutch immigrant to Tasmania, for his wife after they visited Switzerland. The story is that she loved Switzerland so much the he built a village just for her!

As you can see the weather has cleared up beautifully.

There is a hotel here and a few activities for kids around. It’s very quaint but I don’t think I could spend a night here.

Our next stop was Marion’s Vineyard, established in 1979 by a Cypriot and Californinan couple with stunning views across the Tamar. There is no restaurant here but there is a beautiful area to enjoy a bottle of wine and a cheese platter. As we had reservations for lunch elsewhere we just did the wine tasting. If you buy a bottle the tasting is free. We had acquired quite a taste for Tasmanian wine so we did buy a few bottles between us.

It was such an interesting winery with lots of quirky decor in a taverna type setting.

This painting was on the wall inside the bar area and I just loved it. Can you recognise all these characters? Hubby knew them all of course, Laurence and Maddy had no idea, I knew most.

A stained glass image of the barn at night. The barn is pictured in the featured image.

The essential rusty tool exhibit, all Australian wineries have one!

From here we drove to our lunch venue, Timbre Kitchen, located in Velo Wines. When our waitress handed us the menu we wanted to order nearly everything on it! It all looked so delicious and of course once again I forgot to take photos of the food.

Naturistic lighting

After a most enjoyable lunch, there was still enough time left to visit another winery for some more tasting! With so many wineries to choose from it was hard to pick just one. In the end we opted for The Swinging Gate. We were lucky to get a table as it was very popular with the wine tours, bookings are recommended. This time we were served at the table for different tastings and given a sheet of paper to mark down our verdicts.

I thought the “waste not want not” attitude to various items of furniture was a great idea, hence the doors on the wall.

A view from The Swinging Gate of Domescape Glamping in the Vines.

And really that was all we had time for, most of the wineries close at 4pm. A relaxing drive back to Launceston and tonight was our last night in Tasmania.

  • Mud Bar, Launceston Seaport
  • Launceston Seaport

20 comments

  1. Mmmm winery/ vineyard tour, now that’s something we like to do to! We did one in Korcula in Croatia last year which was very enjoyable. Love that painting too, I did recognise many of those faces but Phil only knew Clint Eastwood, he isn’t such a film person😁

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  3. Really enjoyed your tour of Tasmania Alison. Definitely hope to get there at some point. The wine tours looked interesting too reminding me of our stay in the Hunter Valley quite sometime ago. It must have been so nice having Laurence and Maddy with you for part of the time too.

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    • Thanks Marion, I think Tasmania is greatly overlooked by overseas travellers, I hope you make it someday. Yes it’s wonderful that they both enjoy travelling with us, we have lots of fun

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  7. So charming! I really love the ‘waste not want not’ idea of giving everything a second life as decoration. And I really loved the old west painting on the wall- I knew about half of the characters 🙂

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