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Trip Start
Oct 15, 2007
1
62
97
Trip End
Aug 24, 2008
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Renwick,
South Island,
New Zealand
Friday, February 22, 2008
We drove over to Renwick and looked around for somewhere that we could park Lucy. Unfortunately, there didn't seem to be much around the vicinity of the vineyards. Also, it was starting to get late, so we decided to go to the DOC site nearby and dedicate the whole of the next day to wine tasting.
The plan for the rest of the day then was to buy ingredients for our tea, then find the DOC and camp up for the evening. We sorted the supermarket bit out quite easily, although we got ID'd for buying wine. Jacob, due to be thirty in two weeks, was not impressed. "Oh, we have to ask, take it as a compliment, hahaha, etc." No. I'll take it as a waste of my time having to go out to the car park to get my overseas Passport because you won't accept my overseas driving licence, a waste of the time of all the people queuing behind me, and an indicator of how appalling your judgement is, if it's all the same to you.
Jacob then proceeded to huff to himself over the bag of chips we bought from the neighbouring fish and chip shop. Chippies here are a bit weird, it seems. They don't just have a bunch of fish and a big stack of chips ready in a hot cabinet. Each order is cooked, in order of ordering (as it were), regardless of how big or small the order is. So our bag of chips took about twenty minutes, because the bloke in front of us wanted three fish, a sausage and four chips or somesuch.
Anyway...to the DOC! As usual, this took a lot of time and diesel. We had a game of 'What the bloody hell do you mean?' on the way, which is always a laugh. The road we were to take wasn't, as per the directions, called Onamalutu Road. There was an extra junction that the directions didn't give any clues how to deal with. There was also the small matter of it being about 12km further down the wrong road than it should have been. Easy - they weren't really trying with this one.
The site was lovely though: a great big field with just us in it. We claimed the picnic bench, had a brew and read the magazines that Kirsty had found in the toilet block. Eventually, we got round to cooking. We both have a weakness for terrible magazines and spent far too long reading each other the awful stories ('My son's temporary tattoo turned out to be a death sentence!', 'My brother-in-law's sister turned out to be my long lost pen-friend!' etc), so it was getting dark. We cooked by head torch and agreed that we would have to look into getting a lantern soon.
Food cooked and eaten, we became aware of some big eyes watching us. An owl, sitting in a tree, was wondering who these big lumbering creatures were and why they were scaring away his mice. We went to bed and left him to his rodents.
In the morning, we drove back to Renwick but decided that we should prepare for being unable to drive later, so carried on to the neighbouring larger town of Blenheim as it has at least one more cash machine than Renwick's grand total of none. Having got cash, fuel and salad for tea, we parked Lucy outside a vineyard and went tasting.
The first vineyard, Lake Chalice, was very good. The owner was a friendly lady who we nattered to for a while about the daftness associated with wine tasting (she had a laminated card listing some of the 'correct' terms used for describing wines), admired her dog, which she was training as a guide dog for the blind and, of course, tasted their very pleasant range of wines.
Down the road, we visited Domaine Georges Michel, another vineyard, which was a lot more snobbish. The member of staff was a bit aloof and nothing like as friendly. Their stuck-uppishness notwithstanding, they did have quite an interesting 'parallel' range of wines, in which they used some of each grape harvest according to traditional European wine techniques, and some following more typically 'New World' practices. The fruit was the same, so we weren't sure quite how big the difference could be, but it was really very apparent. Predictably though, the European stuff was what they regarded as their 'premium' wine, regardless of how good the Kiwi equivalent may have been.
They also made quite a point of being a 'screw top free zone', which really is little more than snobby nonsense. A cork, a rubber stopper, a crown cap, a screw top...who cares? As long as the bottle's contents are adequately retained, it really doesn't matter. Jacob made the point that nobody has ever sent a bottle back because the wine's reacted badly with a screw top and gone off, at which the woman behind the counter mumbled something about "Hmph, you'd be surprised, our owner's French, he likes corks, grumble mumble mutter..."
Still, free wine, in reasonable quantity, so not all bad. The next vineyard on the map was closed, but 'The Village' next door wasn't. This one wasn't just a vineyard either, it was a complex of three little shoppy outletty bits for various food and drink products, as well as a restaurant and a 'handicrafts barn'.
The first one subject to our scrutiny was the 'Prenzel' brand shop. They stocked mainly spirits and liqueurs, but had quite a range of honey, mustard, salad dressings, flavoured oils - deli stuff. Some of the flavoured liqueurs were pretty good, their vodka tasted, as vodka always does (despite what the good people at Smirnoff may tell you), of hairspray fumes, but the real star was the Blenheim Bay Gin. Spectacular, subtle, dry yet somehow smooth, fruity yet rich in herbal notes, this was proper, world class gin. We should have bought a crate or two, but backpacking around the world for a year doesn't lend itself brilliantly to such purchases.
Next door was a little knick-knacky gift shop affair, offering tastings of their olive oils. We'd learnt by now (from an olive oil tasting bloke in a supermarket in Auckland) that if it tastes like freshly cut grass, you say it's 'rich in herbaceous notes'. Some were rich in herbaceous notes (a brownie point or two scored with the staff), some peppery, some tasted of...well, of olives, but they were all pretty good.
One door along was The Village winery, where a Dutch ex-pat fed us some really good Riesling, in amongst some other perfectly good stuff. By now we were feeling a mite wobbly, so tottered back towards where we'd left Lucy. We stopped briefly (as short a time as seemed polite before running away screaming) in the pastel toned cross-stitch horror-show that was the Handicrafts Barn, then went and had a snooze in the van for a while.
Fully refreshed, we decided that although we'd been intending to stay the night, we would push on for Nelson.
So we did.
