Travelling through Australia this past summer as one of a group of Americans accompanying Grateful Palate importer Dan Phillips, I learned to expect the unexpected. At one wine estate in the Barossa Valley, we were greeted with a roaring morning bonfire (since it's winter there), and Bloody Mary's to take the chill off. At another, we were invited along on a midnight bush tour, where from a fleet of pickup trucks careening through the open fields and dense forests, we "spotlighted" scores of terrified kangaroos fleeing their menacing pursuers, and even spotted a lone emu loping crazily through the woods to escape the fracas.

So it shouldn't have surprised me when, on a trip-ending sojourn out to Wild Duck Creek Estate in Victoria, we capped off our tasting of some of the most dense and powerful shirazes on the planet with, you guessed it, Duck Muck sundaes! But I get ahead of myself.

Wild Duck Creek is the brainchild of David 'Duck' Anderson, a self-taught winemaker whose full-throttle Cabernets and Shirazes have been among the darlings of critic Robert Parker for a number of years now, and it's easy to see why. We tasted a 1996 Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve aged in New french oak which was saturated with fruit, scented with eucalyptus, and flavored with mocha and chocolate, with finely grained tannins that lasted on the palate for minutes. We tasted a more European-style Yellow Hammerhill 2001, Anderson's Shiraz Malbec blend, all redolent of manure, hummus, tobacco and smoke. We tasted Duck Muck Shiraz "sort of", from the 01 vintage as well, poured from magnum, which came from the middle five rows of the estate vineyard; a truly "sick bird" in the words of one member of our group.

We even did a fascinating assay into the issue of Stelvin closures (screw caps to the non-geeks among you), tasting side-by-side two bottles of the 2002 Springflat Shiraz, one bottled with cork and the other with the controversial cap. I preferred the earthier, more nuanced, and decidedly less fruit-forward of the two wines - naturally assuming that must be the cork closed bottle. I was aghast and just a little flummoxed by the revelation that my preferred bottle was actually the Stelvin version, but then I was gratified when, by a margin of about two-to-one, the rest of the group seemed to agree with me.

Then, as a final surprise, the irrepressible Duck, grinning from ear to ear, introduced his wife and assorted helpers as they strode forward bearing trays of ice cream sundaes, topped off with generous globs of $300 a bottle Duck Muck Shiraz. We were aghast, amused, and well, hungry! So down the hatch they went, the most expensive sundaes we're ever likely to slurp. And you know what? They were absolutely delicious!