In New Zealand, vol. 1

Visiting New Zealand has been a life long dream for my wife Karen. While I never jump at the chance to spend 13 hours on a plane, if a wine growing area is involved, count me in. What surprised me is that after a couple of glasses of wine and a sleeping pill, the flight was nearly painless, much more so than the flights to Europe. You leave San Francisco in the early evening, have a glass or two of wine, take your sleeping pill and you wake up the next morning a couple hours from Auckland. The great thing is that you arrive in the morning, granted it is day later, but the jet lag is minimal.

Karen's best friend is a Kiwi who lives in Portland named Katie. Katie has a big extended family in New Zealand and we started out tour hosted by Katie's sister Gia who lives in Point Chev just outside of Auckland. The fantastic thing about New Zealand is the diversity of wine in such a small place. In the North, the warmer climates thrive and the further South you go the climate changes and cooler varieties make up a bigger part of the mix.

Our first day trip was taking the ferry to Waiheke island, home of nearly twenty small producers. The island produces a variety of wines, centered more around warmer weather varieties like Cabernet and Merlot. The island is a beautiful place, like most of the New Zealand we have experienced so far. In addition to wine, we saw a fair amount of olive groves, something increasingly popular in New Zealand
wine growing areas.

I wish I could tell you more about the various producers of Waiheke Island, but we decided to pitch up and have lunch at a producer called Te Moto Vineyards. It is very common for producers to have restaurants in the vineyard. And, lunch in New Zealand at the vineyard is an all day affair. So, while I can't tell you much about the other producers of Waiheke Island, I can tell you that after a bottle of  good Marlborough Savy(Sauvignon Blanc) and vertical glass pours of 99,2000 and 2001 Te Moto Vineyards Merlot, we were well on our way to getting to know New Zealand wines.

We left Auckland at the end of the weekend and headed to Wellington, to meet Katie's brother Paul and his wife Mary. Paul works for a New Zealand distributor called Eurowines. More later on the great trip to Martinborough and the wines of Ata Rangi and Dry River.

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