Harvest finishes and I travel the land

So here I am on a ferry to Wellington. It’s been a fun couple of weeks just passed, not to mention a good few months. I finished up harvest pretty well, doing my job effectively and continuing to learn. All in all it was a good harvest, with a pretty laid-back crew and a well equipped winery coming together into an easy harvest. There were just enough long days to make it feel like harvest, but enough short days to let me fit in a social life.

Well, by social life, I mean hanging out with Danni. She’s a cool chick, someone I can hang out with and talk bullshit with for hours without getting bored. And she’s crazy wild and active to boot which makes for some good adventures. We’ve gotten up to a lot, including a trip up to Auckland to visit her friends who live on Waihiki Island. As it turned out, her friends were going through a breakup and were total dicks to us, yet we managed to have a lot of fun in spite. We went out to a bar and saw a really shitty band and somehow that was fun. Then on the drive home we went to these isolated hot springs near Rotarua. Trying to find the hot springs was pretty difficult, since there was steam rising from heaps of spots but then the water wouldn’t be hot. So while searching, I fell into the stream at one point while attempting to check if the water was hot enough. The things I do for love of hot springs. But we eventually found it and it was amazing, beautiful and fun.

But I said goodbye for the moment and hit the road, setting off on my tour around the country as part of my Douglas Wisor Memorial Scholarship. For the next two weeks, I toured around to many of the best wineries across the country. I won’t go into detail about my winery visits since I already have done so on my other blog about the scholarship, dougwisor.blogspot.com. I started out in Martin borough (where I partied it up a bit with one of the winemakers and her staff), then took the ferry from Wellington (on the southern tip tip of the north island) to Picton (on the northern tip of the south island) and on to Blenheim in Marlborough. After Marlborough I drove up to the Marlborough Sounds and did a hike along the Queen Charlotte Sound. I actually ran about half of it, because I had so much energy from having spent too much time in a car and standing around drinking wine. Also because it was near sunset and I didn’t want to get lost in the woods at night. It was beautiful, with an interesting range of flora, from beech trees at higher altitude to ferns and palms at lower altitudes. After sunset, I drove three more hours to Kaikoura, a little town on the east coast of the south island, where I spent the night. The next day I visited wineries in Waipara, then drove into the large city of Christchurch.

In Christchurch I met up with an old friend, Cris Carter. Cris was the assistant winemaker at Penner-Ash when I worked there in 2008, and we were good friends back then, hanging out every day, but hadn’t seen each other since. He had recently quit his job with Penner-Ash and hit the intern trail again, and had just spent the season at one of the wineries I would visit later in the week, in Central Otago. We hadn’t been able to meet up during the harvest because we were significantly far away from each other (multiple days drive or very expensive flights) but luckily were passing through the same city at the same time. I’d bought a ticket for a live music show, of the band Fat Freddy’s Drop, but they were sold out by the time Cris tried to buy one. So we hung out catching up over a bottle of wine, then shared a smoke and walked downtown. We went over to the venue to see if we could find a scalper selling tickets. It was perfect, as Cris was able to buy a ticket for $20 less than I’d paid then was within ten feet of my seat. So we had a couple of beers in the lounge and filed inside with the rest of the crowd for the show. It was a sit-down venue, not really my style, but the performance was quite solid. They put me into a zone and I just sat there digging the music for hours. There was no opening act but the main played for over two hours.

The next day we started up with a run through the city. We jogged through the main park in town and the downtown area. Perhaps the best part was seeing a bunch of kids, maybe five years old, playing rugby. It was the most energetic, dirty rugby I’ve ever seen.

After cleaning up and killing a bottle of wine with lunch, we walked downtown and spent the last of the sunny day knocking back some brews at a local brewpub. It felt nice after drinking so much wine recently. Then Cris’ friend Matt and two others joined us at the pub and we had some dinner, then went to a thrash metal show of some friends of theirs. The show was “all-ages,” which meant a bunch of 15-year-olds standing around awkwardly and staring and flirting. There was even a semicircle in front of the band, into which nobody would move, except a couple of kids who tried to mosh, to no avail. The show basically sucked but the after party was sweet, and there wasn‘t a teeny bopper in sight, thank god. We went back to their place and drank and otherwise intoxicated ourselves to pass the night euphorically.

The next day I slept it off then took it easy, catching up on some internet stuff I needed to do (blogging, winery research, emails, hardcore porn). Then on Monday I did the long, shitty wet drive from Christchurch to Central Otago. It took seven hours, because due to bad weather the main road through the mountains (supposedly quite beautiful) was closed. So I went the long ugly route and got there eventually. I then toured wineries in Otago for two days before driving to the west coast and the glaciers. I stayed the night in the town of Fox Glacier, drinking myself to sleep on a bottle of homemade grappa given to me by the winemaker Nick Mills at Rippon. On the grappa, before going to sleep, I went for a night hike through the jungle near town. It was pretty spooky, pitch black and full of jungle noises. Occasionally I would turn off my light and stop for awhile, letting the jungle forget I was there and return to its normal flow and noises. It was pretty cool. At certain points along the trail I saw glow-worms, these microscopic worms that create pinpoints of blue light. There would be swathes of them if you turned off your light.

The next day I got up early and hiked up to the glacier, which was anti-climactic. After all, a glacier is just a big chunk of ice. I mean, it was cool, but I didn’t even get to walk on it, due to safety restrictions. In Alaska at 16 I walked one with my friend Danielle Woolen, and that was pretty awesome. Afther the glacier hike I went to a local lake and hiked around it, getting some amazing view of the glacier and Mt. Cook in the distance, the tallest mountain in New Zealand. The lakeside itself was quite beautiful. I then drove north to Franz Joseph Glacier, where I hiked a bit as well. I finished my day by driving up the highway to Moutere, near Nelson. I arrived perfectly on time for dinner at the house of John and Ness Kavanaugh, two excellent people. We shared pizza and salad and wine and good conversation while their two kids Tom and Grace played computer games. The kids turned out to be pretty cool as well.

The next day I visited both of their wineries and one more, then we all went out that night to the local pub for some live music and dinner. It was all pretty average except the beer, which was exceptional. I guess Nelson is the heart of a microbrew revival such as happened awhile back in California and Oregon. They like the English style ales more than the pale ales we favor, with more creaminess and low carbonation rather than our tendency toward bitterness and bubbles. It was a good night.

The next day I zipped down to the ferry and hopped over to Wellington. I'm now in my hostel watching a movie and blogging, so I'll have to tell you the rest later...hopefully I can find some good live music.