36 hours of travel and airports and you stagger out, coughing, like a blind white mole into the dazzling Adelaide summer.

How I love this place!

There's lots to do in a week... Tons of work. However, first ... The Big Moment!

To McLaren Vale. Turn left off Kangarilla Road at our dear old RedHeads shed (now outgrown, the sign gone, leased to another keen new 'start-up'). No sadness though; go a few hundred yards up Foggo Road to the top of Chalk Hill, to ... the shiny all NEW RedHeads shed.

It's four times as big! It's so new! It's just 'this week'! The concrete isn't set yet, the electrician is still wiring. So not quite a winery yet. It's a 'site' still. But ... a site for sore eyes! Ho Ho. The old RedHeads sign is here. Even if its not been fixed on yet. The new fermenters are just being fork lifted through the door as we watch. Same as the old two ton, open tubs except now in stainless steel, not plastic. Nothing wrong with plastic but well, you have to try improve, always.

Grapes will be here in days ... or maybe hours! It looks like a superb vintage and it is VERY ripe. There's another smaller new shed with a new RedHeads sign actually up. That's the 'Cellar Door'. That's where you come to taste and drink eat and chat and chill out ... And there's Steve's offices, Steve's Jack Russel; Momo, and Steve's Black Berkshire pigs. And the same old RedHeads crowd, standing, waiting, with, as always, 'welcome home' cold beers. All looking speculatively at those pigs ... and that splendid man-dream of a barbie.

Adam 'Hoops' Hooper; chief winemaker, Nat McMurtrie, Phil 'Philbo' Christiansen, Big Andrew Pieri. Justin Lane who handed over running things to Steve Grimley, not here – has his own place about 200 yards away. The others all have their own shed wineries close by too. The ancient shack where Justin introduced me to 'shed winemaking' (as originated by Philbo) which kicked off the whole RedHeads thing in 2002 is even closer.

So everything has changed...yet nothing's changed.

RedHeads, which isn't really a winery, more an attitude, more a good wine-and-good mates way of life, is growing and spreading. But managing to keep its wild soul.

And just at this particular moment in my life I am so very, very glad to be here in the sun with Henry (and with Tom tomorrow) and my old friends. Lots and lots to do, yes. No rest.

But that's tomorrow. Light the barbie!

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