Adventures In Adelaide

Here’s what I love about Adelaide; it moves at a pace that invites you to breathe. Sydney and Melbourne are both amazing destinations but operate at a frantic pace.

Adelaide, with the afternoon sun pooling on sandstone terraces aside the River Torrens, provides the perfect balance of serenity and vibrancy. It’s a place where you can taste Australia’s wine history with lunch and feel a whole stadium tilt between the joy and heartbreak of footy by night.

That picturesque river curls around the CBD like a ribbon with famed vineyards skimming the foothills like a green hem. And I’ve come here to experience one vineyard in particular.

If the legend of South Australian wine is written in stone and oak, Penfold’s Magill Estate is its living footnote. Founded in 1844 by Dr Christopher and Mary Penfold on the slopes of Magill, around 8km from Adelaide’s CBD, it remains one of the world’s few urban single-vineyard wineries.

Once covering approximately 120 hectares, over time the original estate has been reduced by suburban growth to about 5.2 hectares wrapped around its historic heart.

The site’s fabric tells the story: Grange Cottage – the Penfolds’ 1844 home – still stands beside the original stone cellars, with heritagelisted bluestone buildings and a network of underground tunnels (“drives”) linking the working barrel rooms to the modern cellar door, kitchen and fine-dining restaurant that operate on the estate today.

Visitors can walk a living timeline of Australian wine here – through cottage, tunnels and cellar – while looking out over the last vines of Magill Estate. 

The cellar tour slips you through dim corridors where the air smells of earth, toasted staves and time. Guides talk of experimentation and audacity – Max Schubert and the birth of Grange, for example – while you trace a finger over ancient redgum beams and chalked barrel heads. In Cellar 9, ask to see the storied “Helen Keller” barrel (technically a vast old vat): during a 1948 visit, Keller paced the enormous vat’s girth and, by touch alone, accurately gauged its enormous capacity.

The vat was later inscribed with her name and remains a much-loved curiosity – equal parts folklore and fact in a subterranean room.

My travel experience also featured a sumptuous tasting menu of local lamb and beef, paired perfectly to the Penfold’s rich, leathery reds that the winery is renowned for. Pricey, but an experience that will last with me – and any visitor – for many years.

The next morning, with the city slowly coming to life, I enjoy a tranquil wander along the River Torrens / Karrawirra Pari: the city’s green spine.

Here, art doubles as wayfinding. Shaun Kirby’s “Talking Our Way Home” scatters five origami-like boats across the waterline – sharp silhouettes that feel mid-conversation with the river’s breeze, while John Wood’s galvanised-iron “River Markers” nod to the pre-colonial landscape and the species that once crowded the riverbanks here.

Even the Popeye River Cruiser I hopped aboard was adorned stern to bow with local artist Alice Lindstrom’s work, “River Tapestry”.

As the afternoon thins to gold, attention turns to Adelaide Oval, a cathedral of Australian Rules Football framed by the stately gums of the Park Lands with the old manual scoreboard peering over the hill.

On match day, the stadium hums before you even see the turf: scarves looped, meat pies steaming, chants finding their rhythm. It’s a clean and modern stadium, and the atmosphere when the Crows are winning is electric. I left still in the dark as to how Aussie Rules football is played, but it’s a high energy game that is certainly enormous fun to watch.

If you want something unforgettable from your night at the Oval, you can book a stadium RoofClimb Game On experience and watch a quarter from a rooftop perch above the crowds. Or if your timing misses a fixture, the behind-thescenes tour – changing rooms, heritage galleries, even the players’ race – still delivers a spine-tingling sense of place.

Back in the CBD, wandering the many laneways that stitch from the river to the markets, it’s delightful to discover many small surprises: light-boxed “ART POD” exhibitions in civic nooks, murals that appear between café windows and wine bars, and sculptural interventions that make the city feel delightfully unfinished in the best way possible.

Use the Council’s public-art map as a scavenger hunt, you’ll find yourself looping between galleries and gelato, pausing for a Negroni as traffic murmurs past. Adelaide’s art isn’t an itinerary item so much as a companion – always nearby, casually intriguing.

With vineyards, the river, and streetlevel creativity, it’s the balance that defines Adelaide’s charm: absolutely serious about flavour and sport, relaxed about everything else.

On my next trip I will definitely have to explore further to the famed beaches and into the Adelaide Hills. But this fleeting trip to the CBD had the essentials: a sip of living wine history beneath Magill, art that turns a stroll into a story, and the communal roar of footy folding over the Torrens as the lights come up. That’s Adelaide: cultured, easy-going, and quietly unforgettable.