Top Things to Do in Adelaide

The Barossa Valley's wide, sunny roads were practically designed for open-top motoring, and a half-day tour in a classic Ford Mustang convertible delivers the valley the way it looks in your imagination: rows of gnarled Shiraz vines scrolling past, the warm smell of dry grass and eucalyptus flooding the cabin, and the growl of the V8 engine echoing off stone church walls as you pass through villages like Tanunda, Angaston, and Nuriootpa. The tour is capped at two passengers, so it is a private experience with stops at cellar doors your driver selects based on what you like to drink.

The Adelaide Hills Cleland and Hahndorf tour pairs two of the Hills' strongest draws in a single day. Cleland Wildlife Park sits in the Mount Lofty Ranges at an elevation where the air is noticeably cooler and damper than the city below, and the park's open enclosures let you hand-feed kangaroos and wallabies who are habituated, not performing. From Cleland, the tour descends into Hahndorf for lunch, where the village's German heritage shows in half-timbered shopfronts, the malty aroma of craft beer drifting from the brewhouse, and bakeries selling soft pretzels with grainy mustard. The small-group format keeps the day unhurried, with time to linger rather than tick boxes.

Adelaide's laneway bar culture runs deep but invisible. The Adelaide Hidden Bar Tour cracks open the doors that most visitors walk past without noticing, leading you into cocktail dens concealed behind unmarked facades, through bookshelf-disguised entrances, and down staircases into basement rooms where the air smells of bitters and citrus peel. Each stop includes a crafted drink, and your guide contextualizes the bars within Adelaide's broader transformation from conservative state capital to one of Australia's most inventive small-bar cities. The atmosphere shifts with each venue: dim brass-lamp warmth in one, exposed-brick industrial cool in the next, the sound of ice cracking in a mixing glass threading through every stop.

Elderton Wines occupies a prime Barossa Valley site on the Nuriootpa main road. But the Elite Tasting Experience bypasses the standard cellar-door counter entirely. You are taken into the private tasting room or barrel hall, where the winemaker or a senior staff member pours a curated flight that includes museum-release wines, current flagships like the Command Shiraz, and occasionally a barrel sample of something unreleased. The tannin structure of Elderton's old-vine Shiraz is immediately tactile, gripping the sides of your tongue, while their white wines carry a floral lift that surprises visitors expecting the Barossa to be all about red. The room smells of seasoned French oak and polished concrete.

The Barossa Valley Shared Tour with Wine Tasting and Lunch solves the practical problem that stops many visitors from exploring the Barossa independently: the valley's best cellar doors are spread across a wide area, and the driver needs to stay sober. This shared-format tour picks you up in Adelaide, visits three to four producers across the valley, includes a sit-down lunch at a vineyard restaurant, and returns you to the city by late afternoon. The shared format means you taste alongside other travelers, which often produces the day's best moments: spontaneous debates about which Shiraz was the table's favorite, new friendships forming over a long pour of Grenache. The valley's landscape, golden-green in spring, tawny in late summer, fills the van windows between stops.