South Australia has quietly become one of our favourite states to plan trips around, and this November journey, Adelaide, the Barossa Valley, and a finish at the rebuilt Southern Ocean Lodge on Kangaroo Island, showed exactly why.

Adelaide itself was a short, easy opener: a stroll through the Adelaide Central Market for lunch, an afternoon in the Adelaide Hills, and dinner at one of the city’s laneway restaurants that’s quietly become some of the best dining in the country. From there it was a short drive into the Barossa Valley, where we spent two days moving between small producers and genuine icons of Australian wine.

A highlight was Seppeltsfield’s Taste Your Birth Year experience, drawing a fortified wine directly from a barrel laid down in the year you were born, the kind of thing that sounds like a gimmick until you’re actually standing in the Centennial Cellar tasting it. We balanced the big names with smaller cellar doors, a long lunch at Fino, and a 4WD trip up into the Barossa Ranges for views back over the whole valley at golden hour.

The final leg was the one we’d all been waiting for: a flight to Kangaroo Island and two nights at the rebuilt Southern Ocean Lodge, which has returned even more impressive than before the 2020 bushfires. Floor-to-ceiling glass looking straight out over the Southern Ocean, a clifftop pool that feels like it’s hanging in the air, and a degustation dinner built almost entirely around the island’s own produce. By day we walked among sea lions at Seal Bay, watched koalas doze in the gums of Hanson Bay, and stood on the wild, wind-scoured cliffs of Admirals Arch as the swell rolled in from Antarctica with nothing in between.

City, wine country and one of the most complete wildlife islands in the country, finished off at one of the best lodges anywhere in Australia. South Australia rarely shouts about itself, but trips like this one make the case better than any amount of marketing could.