Shome mishtake, surely?

It appears that Tourism Victoria is under the impression that I'm a wine and food writer. Though I enjoy both, nothing could be further from the truth, so I was a bit surprised today to find three winery visits with tastings on the itinerary. It's rather difficult when faced with experts deconstructing the elements of viognier, trying to hold my own when I have in the past confused chardonnay with cabernet. I threw the towel in early, and am afraid that at best I disappointed the cellar manager when I passed up on the chance to try his shiraz, and at worst made an enemy of him for life.

The soil round here is 500 million year-old Cambrian dirt, which makes for wonderful red wines, apparently - but I was much more taken by the liberal scattering of massive granite boulders on the hills near Tooborac. Pretty spectacular, all the more so for being mysterious. To me, anyway. No doubt the geologists would chunter on knowledgeably about - well, I don't know about what, that's the point. Sometimes it's more fun not to know things. Who said that? Not me, I'm a teacher, that would be heretical.

Tonight we're staying at the Emeu Inn in Heathcote, which claims to have the longest main street in Victoria (or the world - depends who you're talking to) at 5 kilometres. The inn's curious name is evidently Portuguese for ostrich, which coincidentally is almost the same as the actual word for emu, which is what they were referring to. All a bit confusing, linguistically - but the inn is lovely: friendly and comfortable, old and interesting.

And the place swarms with roos. Well, we saw more than a dozen out grazing by the road at dusk: a virtual mob. That's the correct collective noun for kangaroos. If it had been any darker, I'd've needed a lighting boost. So then they would have been a flash mob. And speaking of which, Oprah was in Melbourne today, causing Beatlemania-type hysteria in Federation Square. Tch. How uncool.