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gisborne

Alexis, Joan

Kim Crawford 2008 “Unoaked” Chardonnay (Gisborne/Hawke’s Bay) – Sweet tropical candy. Dried fruit. Rainier cherry? Eh. (3/09)

Patutahi your shoelaces

[bottle]Brancott 2005 Gewürztraminer Patutahi (Gisborne) – Vibrant fruit, flowers, spice, peach, and nuts, with a dry finish. It’s a little lighter than I’d like; gewürz of this intensity should have a little more heft. (2/08)

Friendly fields (New Zealand, pt. 18)

[Amisfield winery]We need a drink

With ten days ahead of us, and a nicely-equipped kitchen here in our Queenstown vacation rental, we’ve got certain needs. Travel essentials and food will come later. Right now, however, we’re in search of something even more fundamental: something to drink. With wineries just down the road, there’s no better time than now…and no better way to shop than to taste before buying, hopefully learning something along the way.

Five definitions of central

Of all the wine regions of New Zealand, the Central Otago is the source of the highest hype to output ratio. This is not to suggest that the area’s exploding reputation is built on a pile of horse manure, but rather to note that, 1) there’s just not that much wine, 2) what wine there is, is produced in fairly small quantities, 3) quality wines and producers make up a typically small percentage of the overall total, and 4) the entire region is very, very young.

Throughout the length and breadth of the Central Otago, freshly-tilled fields and new plantings are spreading like kudzu across often-difficult hillsides and slopes. This means that quantitative issues are being addressed as rapidly as possible, but it doesn’t necessarily say much about quality. Especially given that the reputation of the region is based almost entirely on the massively fickle pinot noir grape, the road ahead is going to be much like the road today: filled with eager but insufficient young contenders and a growing sense of entitlement-without-justification. The wines may sell themselves to the curious, but they won’t do so forever. The Central Otago does show many signs of becoming one of the world’s great pinot noir regions, but it is not there yet, and only a continued commitment to quality over commercialism will allow it to achieve the status it may well deserve.

Adding to the confusion is the geographical haphazardness of the vignoble. “The Central Otago” is actually somewhere between four and seven distinct regions, depending on how one wants to classify vineyards, and they are not close to one another. Cromwell, an historic mining town turned agricultural center thanks to a highly-reputed fruit industry, is slowly finding its niche as the geographical “center” of the area’s disparate vineyards, but unfortunately the town itself doesn’t possess immense tourist appeal, and many visitors to the area will instead choose to stay in Queenstown, at one extreme end of the region and necessitating a lot of long and twisty drives to reach most worthwhile wineries.

Local vineyards are probably most sensibly grouped by their terroir (which is how one gets to the number seven), but in such a young region with a barely emergent wine culture, it’s far too early to make definitive statements thereto, except in the most preliminary sort of fashion. Thus, I prefer to group the vineyards in terms of geography for the time being, especially as this is how most visitors will experience them. Five distinct locales form the basis of a complete tour of the Central Otago: Gibbston, Wanaka, Cromwell, Bendigo, and Alexandra. This classification, I should add, rests on the following caveats: 1) Wanaka has very few vineyards, 2) technically, the Cromwell Basin comprises Cromwell and Bendigo, and the latter has only vineyards…no wineries, 3) Alexandra could perhaps more properly be called Clyde/Alexandra, as most of the vineyards are closer to the former than the latter, and 4) the Cromwell area is, by experienced local growers and winemakers, the site where further subdivisions are most often made, leading to distinct identifiers that include Lowburn, Bannockburn, Pisa Range and Pisa Flats.

Hayes & vines

We start our winery tour in Gibbston, which can easily be split into two sub-regions: Gibbston itself, about a half-hour’s winding drive from Queenstown, and – closer to town, at an intersection that takes one to the charming old gold-mining center of Arrowtown – Lake Hayes. Overall, the area gets more rain, and much cooler temperatures, than most of the rest of the Central Otago sub-regions, and it is primarily for this reason that a lot of blending from other areas goes on. Sometimes it’s quite open, other times it is not. But all those undesignated grapes up in warmer and dryer Bendigo are going somewhere…

(Continued here…)

A passage to insight (New Zealand, pt. 9)

[David Evans Gander]A wrinkle in vine

“How do you go back to the place where everything changed…?” I asked, once, and from that question a travelogue was born. The “place” I had in mind was Milford Sound, on which much more can and will be written many narratives hence, but certainly other interpretations are possible. Here’s one:

“Hello?”

David Evans Gander pokes his head around a doorway. He’s casual in working shorts and shirt, knee-deep in one of those endless tasks that consume every morning, afternoon, and night of a winemaker’s existence. “Just a moment.”

We wait. It’s dark and cool inside, strangely silent outside.

A half-dozen moments later, he re-emerges with bottles in hand, ducks behind the counter of the now-closed winery café (really more of a pizzeria, to the apparent delight of most visitors) to retrieve some glasses, and groups us around a picnic-like table.

“So…how was Stony Batter?”

Rock is their forté

My first day in New Zealand was a bit of a blur. Not so much from jet lag as travel lag, a sense-dulling miasma of displacement and the nasty, filmy feeling of twelve hours of recycled airplane air battling the onrush of a world of new experiences and sensations. Among those sensations was a marvelous little wine – just a glass – shared with Theresa and Sue Courtney at Nourish. I’d spent the morning at Goldwater and Stonyridge, tasting a lot of wines that were – whether better or worse than I’d expected – familiar. But here, at this terrific little bistro, was a glass of sun-filled viognier that rose above all my expectations, especially for this highly cranky grape. Here’s what I wrote at the time:

Passage Rock 2001 Viognier (Waiheke Island) – One of the rarest of wine discoveries, a delicious viognier from somewhere other than Condrieu. Not that it tastes like Condrieu. There’s the requisite midpalate fatness, but it’s braced on both sides with excellent acidity and a lovely floral delicacy. Best of all, there’s no alcoholic heat.

Passage Rock. Few wineries I’ve not visited hold a special place in my heart, and none whereat I’ve tasted only one wine. And yet, there was something about that deliciously brief taste of viognier…well, if I ever got back to Waiheke Island, I vowed to visit. To see what it was all about, to get at the heart of the matter…no, I must admit, my aim was more personal: to try to recapture and relive that memory.

Sue talks about our morning while Evans Gander pours the wine and I study our surroundings. Passage Rock would be, in the absence of Stony Batter, the most remote of Waiheke Island’s wineries, and the facilities obviously represent a sort of haphazard expansion; needs-based, rather than designed. And while the vines fanning out from the main buildings replicate a descent to the sea found at our morning visit, it’s a gentler, slower, shallower descent to a much more distant shore. Which only adds to the feeling of isolation.

Soon enough, however, the first wines are in front of us and we’ve work to do.

(Continued here…)

The land of the flat white crowd (New Zealand, pt. 3)

Prism sentience

Don’t talk to me about rainbows. Those partial-arc terrestrial versions are, at best, pale imitations of what I’m seeing now. I rub the crust of a long airborne snooze from my eyes and gaze, dumbfounded, out the tiny airplane window at vivid lasers of color streaking across the pre-dawn horizon. Above and below are two themes on uninterrupted grayscale, but in-between is the most wondrous display of prismatic brilliance imaginable, the pure refraction of the planet’s encircling atmosphere unhindered by the distractions and diffusions of earthbound land and sky.

I fire up the in-seat video screen and thumb the controls to channel one: the overhead map. The long, island-dotted crossing of the Pacific is, mostly, behind us, and Auckland – our destination – inches centerward. As I twist and stretch stillness-abused muscles and joints, cabin lights stutter and stagger into illumination, while roasted esters of morning coffee drift from the galleys. It’s morning, and New Zealand approaches.

Energy crisis

Perhaps just a little bit of familiarity breeds ease, but this trans-Pacific crossing seems much less body-destroying than the last one, and we arrive at Auckland International Airport fairly refreshed and energized. That energy is tested a bit by a long wait at the other end of customs (a reminder to self: carefully clean golf shoes before flying to a country with obsessive agricultural neuroses) but returns as we step out into the sharp, sunny clarity of an early summer morning. The sky is blue, the grass green, the air clear, and after many months of endless snow, wearying cold, and dreary gray back in Boston, it’s a wake-up call to surpass all others. Our senses are alive, our anticipation peaked. The heart of our long-planned voyage is finally at hand.

A half-hour later, all our energy is gone…sapped by the deadening heat of an airport shuttle caught in a rush hour traffic jam and without compensatory air conditioning (or windows that can be opened), but with the noisy and unavoidable drone of two monitors blaring an endless litany of touristy advertainment. Only the entry into Auckland itself stirs our senses, as we point out familiar landmarks and remembered sites like old friends in a crowd. We’re deposited at the end of Queen Street just across from the glowing orange-golf of the Ferry Building, quickly cross a street that’s nearly devoid of traffic (where’d the rush hour go?), and purchase a small handful of ferry tickets. We’re headed for the sedate retreat of Waiheke Island, a half-hour ferry ride from the sailboat-and-shipping-filled waters of Auckland’s Waitemata Harbor and into the island-dotted expanse of the Hauraki Gulf. We’ve just missed the 9 a.m ferry – curses on traffic jams everywhere – and so, settled into uncomfortable red plastic chairs, we wait for the next…which arrives on the hour in a clanking, creaking din of metal against wood and a hissing vapor of choking exhaust.

The Gulf and its low-slung islands still glisten in bright sun, but every glance westward – back across the towered rise of Auckland and over the mainland – reveals an oncoming wall of rain. It chases us onto the ferry, pauses at the thermal barrier of the Harbor, and then rushes forward once again. It is thus that we have a clear, calm, and sunny passage – the brisk and sweet-smelling wind reviving our travel-dulled minds – but arrive at the sedate and rustic Matiatia passenger terminal on Waiheke Island just as a first few experimental drops of rain fall. The slow trickle of passengers through the cavernous and largely empty terminal is calming enough that the energy of the city already seems a distant memory. We collect a grossly expensive rental car (someone could make a lot of money offering a cheaper alternative to the island’s two rather larcenous automobile agents) and gingerly edge out of the parking lot, Theresa at the wheel and me repeating our British Empire mantra at each intersection and turn: “left…left…on the left…you’re driving on the left…left…left.”

(Continued here…)