Biblio Turismo: Biblio 2012 Stats and Supplemental

A lovely local watering hole.

For those completing the entire journey from Windsor back to Gosford, the bikes covered about 1,325 kms of central NSW in just 4 days, with a few backtracks to pick up fallen luggage...!

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When they got to within a few hundred kms of Barellan riders could see something looming on the horizon. At first Ross thought it might be one of the golden arches - guess he was getting hungry. As the riders got closer and hungrier we could make out the big tennis racket that is a tribute to the local talent of Yvonne Goolagong, the tennis great from the 1970's and 80's. Yvonne won 14 grand slam titles and became the world's #1 tennis player on 26 April 1976. In case you wanted to know where to send your children for the summer, she currently runs a tennis camp in Noosa Heads.

A beaurtiful day for a winery tour.

One of the highlights of the trip was a visit to Casella Winery, founded in 1957. What the riders didn't realise prior to arriving was the scale of the business there. The bottling plant is the worlds fastest, with a capacity of up to 36,000 bottles an hour. The huge tanks on th tour ranged from a piddling 2,000 litres (my garden has a bigger tank than that!) to 1.1 million litres - yep, that's about 1,100 tonnes of glorious vino in just one tank (10 x the capacity of my swimming pool!). This range of sizes means that the vineyard can handle large volumes but can also deal with smaller, premium batches of high quality fruit.

Tanks of vino...

The vineyard is Australia's largest family owned vineyard with 1/5th of all Australian wine exports being its [yellow tail] brand. Casella handles 10% of all Australia's grape crush.

Bottling plant...ahhhh!

While one might think that this scale of business puts a stress on the environment, the plant also has the ability to recycle over 400,000,000 litres of water each year - that's nearly 1,100 tonnes a day, or 45 tonnes an hour, over 760 litres every minute. Actually this is the largest waste water treatment scheme of its type in Australia.

The crates and crates of vino, mostly waiting for export made a quite impressive sight. The riders all did their utmost to make sure that at least some bottles stayed behind in Australia, albeit if their life expectancy (the bottles', not the riders'!) was being measured in hours.