good life: January 2013

Kenepuru Sound, Marlbourgh.
The view from Marge and John's.

Sometimes your own back yard is as nice as any overseas holiday, or, (as is more correctly the case for us) if you're not going to go overseas, you might as well enjoy your own back yard! I recently heard someone refer to it as a 'Stay-cations' - staying close to home is the big thing.

Any which way, we made our way down to the South Island and reacquainted ourselves with that beautiful part of the country, with 2 nights each in Blenheim, Kenepuru Sound, and Nelson.

Pick one, eat one... good think they didn't weigh us before we picked raspberries!

The trip highlights:

1. Kenepuru Sound, Marlborough Sounds. Staying with Marge and John at their batch. Wow, what a beautiful corner of paradise. Whilst we did a virtuous walk on one of the many beautiful tracks on New Year's Day (after a not so virtuous New Year's Eve!) this was only just a small taster, but the scenery we did see was beautiful and we passed plenty of happy hikers. We stayed close to Te Mahia Lodge, which would be a lovely place to stay, and much to my surprise, the owner made a decent Soy Latte (though he somehow didn't take it as a compliment when we said it was almost as good as Ponsonby! Must have been the South Island pride)
Check out my latest favourite foodie experience - BBQ butterflied lamb weighed down and infused with the 'terroir' of a Kenepuru schist rock - yum! Inspired by Annabelle Langbein and skillfully barbecued by John.

The Famous Kenepuru 'terroir' infuses into butterflied lamb.

The finished product - delicious

2. Camping on the beach in Mapua, outside of Nelson, going for Fish and Chips on the wharf at the Smokehouse, eating at a cool little restaurant there called Jellyfish Cafe (their chef just won best chef in the Nelson area), and checking out all the cool arts and crafty places in the area. We loved the Upper Moutere area and it almost felt a bit like the Adelaide Hills. I had bought some Moutere Gold Passionfruit Curd at Farro for Christmas and we met the producer there - I didn't realise they make these in batches of only 8 at a time. Imagine making an order of 1000 for Farro a Christmas! Apparently they are quite exhausted at the end of it.

The Ponsonby camper

3. Nelson. I just love this town. It still has the same artistic, earthy, backpacker vibe as it did about !$@ years ago when I went through the first time on my own backpacking experience. Morris St Cafe is worth checking out for a good coffee and some other cool places to check out were the South Street Gallery, a collection of about 25 potters from the area, and also the World of WareableArts (WOW) exhibition.

I could spend a lot of money here... Lots of nice pottery

4. Hans Herzog, Blenheim, for a degustation dinner. A great little winery restaurant in Blenheim, with a great sommelier, and with great food and wine matches, though we did find the service a bit too slow. Whilst I don't like rushing through a degustation, it took 3 hours to get through the first 4 of 7 courses.

The Wine....

As expected, we went to some good wineries - some favourites and some new. Here are the ones we got to:

1. Himmelsfeld, Moutere. We spent almost 2 hours talking to the winemaker and listening to the many stories she had to tell. If this was any other winery, we would have been greeted by the accolades: "2006 Chardonnay served at the world's top restaurant (Heston Blumenthal's The Fat Duck)" and "served at Meredith's, one of New Zealand's best restaurants", and "2003 Noble Chardonnay awarded top honours in 2006 Paris wine show", highly awarded wines, etc. etc. etc. Instead, Beth Eggers is a down to earth, unassuming, passionate, sustainable, sheep farming winemaker. (Her sheep are employed to help with the leaf plucking!) Of course the Chardonnay was superb. She likes to age her wine, which we like, so as long as this is your style, it's worth a visit.
2. Fromm, Marlborough. The Pinot Noirs are exceptional, especially the Clayvin Vinyard, which is probably one of my favourite Pinot Noirs in New Zealand. This is a winery we make it to every time we get to Marlborough and the cellar door experience hasn't disappointed yet.

Cool shot by Al in the Framingham cellar

3. Framingham, Marlborough: Go the Select Riesling, one of New Zealand's nicest sweeter style Rieslings. We hadn't been here before, but will certainly be one we'd return to.
4. Forrest, Marlborough: Dr. John Forrest does good wine. Worth a visit.
5. Neudorf, Moutere: Some bloody good wines, though it was a bit busy on the day we were there.

We did also go to Cloudy Bay, and Seresin which both have great wines, but disappointingly, the cellar door experience was lacking. Seresin had the frostiest cellar door person (we almost rushed to get out of there - a real shame given their stunning reserve chardonnay which is one of our favourites) and Cloudy Bay was just too commercial with about 30 people at the counter. I guess that is the price of their success. If you go to Cloudy Bay, try to avoid the busy times.

Well, we are going to try to get in a few more camping trips this summer, but to be honest we are about to become seriously distracted by the addition of new dogs, which we also visited on the way home. In the meantime, here's to living in a beautiful country and nice summer holidays.

Some holiday pics from the trip: