NZ: Day 10
The night before we had gone out to find dinner and wandered forever looking for a restaurant to eat in. Ended up wandering way up Columbo Street in search of the Mainstreet Vegetarian restaurant. Nowhere to be found. So we ended up wandering almost all the way back to our hostel to eat a Winnie Bagoes, a gourmet pizza restaurant that was actually pretty good. We watched some rugby with dinner and once again were completely baffled by the rules. I figure if I watched it for weeks at a time, I’d figure it out. The next morning we woke up latish since we didn’t have anything to do till our wine tour at 1pm. We went and wandered around the neighborhood our hostel was in, attempting to find some lunch and were as unsuccessful as the night before. We ended up having to get food at Subway, which was as unappealing as it sounds. However it looked slightly less dodgy than the really dodgy fish-and-chips place right around the corner from it, so I think we came out okay.
The van picked us up and we drove out into wine country. Our guide was a former restaurant owner and current food consultant who worked in the area and knew a lot of the winemakers well. The tour included three wineries. The first was Pegasus vineyards, a larger estate type vineyard with an extensive grounds and restaurant. The wine there was good, but not spectacular. After that were two smaller wineries. The first was Mount Cass, whether we were greeted by a happy dog which was soon disillusioned by our lack of feeding it and went away to sleep. The tasting room here was outside and rather hot, which made it harder to enjoy the wine, which was excellent. They did a late-harvest Chardonnay desert wine, something I haven’t seen anywhere else which was good but not as good as the late-harvest Rieslings we had at the first and third place. They also had the best Pinot Noir of the bunch. The last place was Torlesse Wines, which markets its best wines under the Omihi Road label. The winemaker, who was also running the tasting room, was a garrulous Australian who obviously enjoyed making, drinking, and serving wine. The three almost drunk Christchurch women on the tour and the two drunk Japanese women on the tour gave him no end of amusement. This was my favorite winery of the group, with the best Sauvignon Blanc and the only Gewurtztraminer of the group. I picked up at bottle of the Gewurzt which was only 20 NZ dollars (about 16 US), cheaper than most of the good Alsacian ones you can find in the US. My sister got a bottle of his late harvest Riesling. He also had an excellent fortified port, which I considered picking up but it wasn’t quite good enough to justify having to haul it back to the States.
Got back from the tour and relaxed for awhile, and then headed into town to get dinner at Portofino, an Italian restaurant. Had a good dinner then head back to the hostel. I stayed up pretty much all night playing GalCivII, which was totally worth it.