New Year Resolution: No Wind Farm

So much for a long summer to look forward to enjoying – we had Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day, and now it’s back to normal gusty nor’westerlies screaming down the valley (or gutsy nor’westerlies as I prefer to call them). Happy New Year everyone. Still, all our guests have gone and we had a lovely New Year’s Day lunch outside without being blown away. Fresh paua gathered from Tora, plunged briefly in boiling water after being thinly sliced, then chilled and served with a dipping sauce of Italian white wine vinegar mixed with Tamari soy sauce and grated green fresh ginger on the side. The other salads you see are 1) steamed prawns with avocado sauce (avo’s whipped up in the food processor with sour cream, garlic, honey, tabasco, salt, lemon juice), sliced red onion, fresh lettuce 2) steamed fresh mussels on green mixed leaves with cucumber and tomato with hot & sweet sauce. We also had toast and “caviart”. Washed down with Te Mata Estate Viognier and Chateau Haut Brion 1989. Then sleep.

Over the last week I watched – again – that sweet movie, “The Castle”, an Australian movie about a family fighting to hold on to their house on the edge of Melbourne airport. The authorities can’t understand why they want to carry on living there because they think it’s an “eyesore”. The father is puzzled, to him it’s not an eyesore because it’s full of family memories. A house is not just bricks and mortar, it’s everything that goes on inside, the growing up of the children, all the laughter and tears and so on. And hearing this reminded me of our latest meeting with Meridian Energy, and their inability to understand why many of us in Martinborough do not want a giant wind farm just eight kilometres from the Martinborough town square, sited right next to a site of historical and cultural significance – Nga Waka a Kupe, or the Canoes of Kupe.

To Meridian, this is the best place for wind in the Wairarapa, much like in the film The Castle, the house site they were trying to take by force was the best place to land planes. But to us, Nga Waka a Kupe and its surrounds is more than just wind, it’s a place of unbelievable beauty. When I went up the hill behind our vineyard to catch the horses the other day, I just sat and gazed at the Waka. A hawk was wheeling, crying out as it searched for prey, and I told myself for the millionth time how lucky, lucky, lucky I am to live in such a breathtakingly beautiful place. If I was a tourist visiting this area, cycling around, I would ache to stay here, to just cancel the remainder of my travels, set down my roots, and never move on.

How do you explain all this to the suits who run a taxpayer-owned power company who don’t have to worry about the landscape? I ran into a Wellington friend in Martinborough’s Pain & Kershaws who’d seen our petition against the windfarm. She said she liked them, though her husband didn’t, and he’d signed the petition. I told her that was fine, I’d tell Meridian to put the windfarm on Akatarawa Road where she lives, right outside her back door. The irony, I’m afraid, was lost on her. And that’s the thing – everyone who says they love these giant turbines sidesteps the issue when they’re asked if they’d like them in close proximity to their properties, lowering the value, disturbing their sleep, upsetting their livestock.

Why can’t New Zealand have a national plan for windfarms, and site them well away from people? When we were in Scotland in 2007 we hired a car and drove some 3000 miles all around the coast. In the north, where you could drive literally for miles without seeing any sign of life, we came upon windfarms which were sited on the flats, well away from people. This is what New Zealand should be doing, not sneaking up on people and dividing communities, making them spend good money they can’t afford, fighting taxpayer-owned companies, too arrogant to consult with small, local communities. These are some snaps I took in the north of Scotland:

 

Christmas is over again

Another Christmas done and dusted. This time it was a Coddington Christmas. My brothers trekked to Redbank, to spend it with my 88-year-old mother. We ate one of the piggies as our Christmas ham, glazed with dark ale, one of the now defunct Martinborough Brewing Company ales, called ‘The Square Ale’, mixed with mace, brandy, brown sugar and butter. This is one Christmas season I shall not tire of ham. We also had roasted turkey, basted over four hours in a whole bottle of Palliser Riesling (rated as one of the best by top wine writer Michael Cooper in the latest Listener magazine). We don’t usually use it for cooking, we drink lots of it, but this was a special occasion. The turkey was perfect, not dry at all. The traditional accompaniments – roast agria potatoes, roast golden kumara, fresh asparagus, Cumberland sauce, gravy – yum!

Sister-in-law Angela made lovely Christmas puddings and brandy butter sauce.

But of course we started the day with Christmas cake, made as usual by CCQC, to his mother’s recipe, and iced to perfection – this year with butter icing – by him.

We washed this down with Palliser methode, while we opened the presents from under the tree. I love decorating the tree. We choose it from The Real Christmas Tree Company in Featherston, bring it home and put it up together, then I climb up into the attic and get the decorations and hang them all over the branches before putting the lights up last. Even without any children at home any more, it’s still fun.

As usual, CCQC spoiled me rotten. We were given a new colour printer which is also a photocopier, a CD burner, scanner, fax machine. Plus a lovely bracelet, and a commercial hairdryer because I’m always grizzling about the cord twisting on my old one.

CCQC got from me two beautiful bowls made by local farmer Denis Handyside, one of jarra with copper and ebony insets, and the other of holly with some sort of green wood insets. They’re amazingly detailed and works of art, not to be used. I also gave him a silk tie and silk hankie (cos he’s a Silk), and biography of Sir Ranulph Fiennes.  

Amazingly we had a perfect hot day, with no wind. Can’t say I’m sorry Christmas is over, though, it’s a pretty exhausting time of year. Now we’ve got a month of summer in the vineyard stretching ahead of us to enjoy.

 

James Pinot Gris 2008

Well, the Christmas Party was a cracker. The weather was terrible – gusty nor’westerlies all day but Martinborough people are used to that at this time of the year and they don’t allow a few gales to spoil the fun. Thank goodness for our winery. Everyone had heaps of fun. Nick from Medici, who did the catering, put on a splendid spread, and the last guests left about 6.30pm. It was a great day, and well worth all the effort.

And last week we had some really exciting news. On Wednesday I came home, feeling a bit tired and grumpy, and wondered why I had an urgent email from ACP, Australian Gourmet Traveller Wine magazine, wanting two labels for our James Pinot Gris 2008. As I read on, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Bob Campbell, MW, has nominated our Pinot Gris 2008, as one of the best 100 new releases for an editorial feature in the February/March issue which goes on sale on February 1st, 2010. They are running a feature on the Best of New Zealand. We are so elated to receive an endorsement from someone so highly rated as Bob Campbell. It’s absolutely marvellous, and we couldn’t wait to tell Jane Cooper, our winemaker, and Nick and Rowan Hoskins, our vineyard managers. No wonder the Pinot Gris is selling so well – all those people who drink it and love it have damn good taste!

Meanwhile, the tickets to our Martinborough Home & Garden tour are selling quickly, now that we’ve printed and distributed our flyer. 

So if you want to see inside and around the gardens of seven of this region’s exclusively private, and fabulous, properties, go to www.martinboroughtownandcountry.co.nz for more information or to purchase a ticket.

 

Christmas Party at Redbank

It’s our annual vineyard Christmas Party time, and I was away for four days in Sydney last week, just after heavy rains. These were followed by brilliant warm sunshine so I arrived home to lush growth in the vineyard but, alas, weeds in the garden and lawns up around my ankles. So this week has been slavery in the garden, pulling weeds, mowing lawns, and trimming edges. Today I’ve almost finished and it looks splendid.

The back garden, where I planted heaps of perennials, is a picture, exactly how I wanted it. A real cottage garden, all billowing everywhere, crowded and dreamy, with heaps of flowers to pick. The broad beans have fed us well, as have the artichokes, and the lettuces are coming on just fine.

When I was weeding in front of the shearers’ quarters, Kete was keeping me company as usual, hiding in the grasses and pouncing on my hands. She disappeared under the building and I heard a scream, then she returned with a baby rabbit in her mouth. After killing it, she rolled around on her back with it in her arms like a teddy. Then she ate half of it, now she’s asleep in the lupins, guarding what’s left of it from Winston and the marauding chooks.

The front of the house is the hardest to maintain, because it suffers most from the nor’westerly and the grasses are taking longest to fill in along the pathways. But the lavenders are lovely, and when the lawns are mowed and the edges run over with “Lil Juey”, it’s all worth the effort.

And this is the latest of my roses to bloom. It’s called “Casino”. Isn’t it heaven?

Even the chookhouse has been cleaned up, much to Winston’s delight, as he led his harem on a merry dance through the pea straw. That rooster’s going to be the death of me, he’s so damn (ahem) cocky!

Now all I have to do is waterblast the winery and shearers’ quarters, weed the driveway, Lil Juey round the pig-pen, and do the housework. Phew!

 

Fat Horses, Killer Cat, & RIP Big Black Bull

No, Kete didn’t fell a bull, but more on that later.

Colin Brewer, the farrier, came this week and trimmed the horses’ hooves. I don’t get shoes on them any longer because their feet are so tough, and living on that hill has made them very sure-footed.  The weather’s been fantastic for lush spring grass. Too good for that guts Lily who just doesn’t know when to stop eating and has the telltale signs of obesity in her neck. If horses get too fat they ‘founder’, or get laminitis. That means, basically, their feet pack up causing untold trouble and huge vet bills. So this week the two monkeys have been locked up each day in the yard, away from the clover and rye grass. Much to their chagrin.

That’s a topdressing plane in the middle there, buzzing us, and you can see what a beautiful sky we had. I’ve also had lovely still mornings of riding the two beauties, and taken the chance to school Lily in a few lessons of manners, like standing still while I get on (that took almost an hour), and when I want to go in a circle, that means we go in a circle, not wander off in the direction she thinks is much more interesting, which inevitably means a direction where there might be some juicy clover. She’s as naughty as a truckful of monkeys, but she’s very sweet and means no harm. Smitty’s just a darling, wouldn’t hurt a fly, and in his old age loves to sleep. Except when he thinks Lily is going away, then he behaves like a love-sick teenager.

Called in to Farmer John’s woolshed yesterday to find him cleaning up after having to shoot his five-year-old prime Angus bull. Heart-breaking. It had broken its leg earlier in the week, and the vet had been trying to save it, but to no avail. Farmer John, who’s over 70 and a real old-fashioned farmer (he still buys Denkavit to feed orphaned lambs, even though it loses money and most farmers these days just knock them on the head) had been carrying water to the bull every day in a bucket. I’d taken photos of these bulls earlier this year, they are massively impressive animals:

Now he’s gone, poor booger. Nothing but dog tucker.

Kete must have heard CCQC going on about the blimmin’ hares loping around the vineyard. There are two out the front, one of which is so cheeky it’s almost tame, and just hops out of the way when I go and feed the chooks. One sunny morning the boss slid up the window very quietly, and came back to get the gun to shoot it, but I pleaded with him so tearfully to let it continue enjoy its morning in the sun, he relented. Last night when I went to put Kete to bed I opened the back door and there was a little present on the door mat:

Okay, not a full-grown one, but not a bad effort for a small cat. She was very pleased with herself indeed, and didn’t get out of bed this morning until about 10.30, having eaten the head and the reproductive organs. What a girl!

 

Te Muna Road Wins!

Exciting news. We have champions in our road.

On Saturday night Julicher 2008 Pinot Noir won Champion Wine of the Show at the 2009 Air New Zealand Wine Awards. When we went to bed on Saturday night we wondered why so many cars kept coming up the road. Usually it’s so quiet – and the next morning we found out. So exciting, and so deserved for Wim Julicher and Sue Darling. As well we being champions in New Zealand, their “99 Rows 2008 Pinot Noir” won the Elite Gold Medal, so it was celebrations all round.

And just over the road from the Julicher vineyard, two along from us, is Pond Paddock, vineyard of Jeff Barber and Christine Barnett. They too had a win on Saturday night with their 2008 Pinot Noir, taking a Gold Medal. So congratulations are in order up and down Te Muna Road.

Of course, this is great not just for Te Muna, but for all of Martinborough wines. To see the headline, “Martinborough Wine wins Champion Wine” is very heartwarming. After 30 years of hard work, it’s a great reward, and all the cynics said it couldn’t be done, especially in Te Muna Road. But we knew better. Especially Colin Carruthers, the first person to buy land up here for grape-growing.

We’ve only just released our 2006 Pinot Noir. Our 2008 Pinot Noir won’t be released until this time next year, at the earliest, but we opened a bottle last week, and it’s coming along very, very nicely. And, according to our tradition, we put the entire contents of one bottle in the Christmas Cake.

Cheers.

 

Toast Martinborough

This Sunday, 15th November, is Martinborough’s big day – Toast Martinborough - the annual wine and food festival. This will be the 18th time 10,000 wine and food lovers have descended on our little village to enjoy wine (of course) from the participating wineries, plus food and live music. Once more, it seems the weather gods will smile on us. All week, everyone has been hard at work smartening up the place. Berms have been mowed, edges have been sprayed, gutters have been sucked clean. Banners are fluttering from lamp-posts. All the roses – which Martinborough grows so well – seem to be bursting with pride, and I swear I spent half the afternoon in Pain & Kershaw today buying groceries as everyone was in there chatting – Larrikins from Escarpment with a shopping list for his band, Farmer Stu from Hautotara, Dinny from Soeur, Sue and John who’d just returned from Jim Skerman’s funeral in Havelock North (a lovely, lovely man from whom I rented little Puruatanga cottage when I was a solo Mum in 1977), Grocer David chuckling about the Tui billboard (see end of blog entry).

Events like Toast generate excitement – both emotional and economic.

We’re not going this year, as the boss has been away all week on a fishing trip – his “boyz-own week” - and won’t be back in time. But last year we started off at Palliser Estate with whitebait fritters for breakfast – a tradition. Everyone ends up there, kicking up their heels to The Beat Girls, but I was too sozzled by that time so we walked to Paul & Rosie’s’ place, “Over The Hill”, until we could wend our way home.

Rangitira Richard, from Palliser, despite running around all week like a bluetail fly, managed to get this wonderful sign erected just outside Martinborough for all 10,000 Toast ticket-holders to see when they enter the township. We hope this will give them pause, and they will consider the damage done to future Toast celebrations by the noise and visual pollution of 45, 130-metre high wind turbines from a wind factory just six kilometres away from the town centre.

 

 

Martinborough Home & Garden Tour

Here’s a date to put in your diary – Saturday 27th March 2010. For my sins, I have been roped in to a group which is organising a Town & Country Home & Garden Tour on that date next year to raise funds for the reburbishment of the Martinborough St Andrews Anglican Church hall. It is a beautiful old hall, already used by the community for many worthwhile causes and groups, but badly in need of upgrading. Helen Campbell, a neighbour along Te Muna Road who has boundless energy, asked me to go on the “committee”. Actually, she twisted my arm up my back until I said yes, if you don’t call it a committee, if you call it a group who get together over wine to chat. And if there are no men on it, because men just want to talkee, they don’t want to doee. Well, we do have a man, but he’s the treasurer.

We have secured seven of Martinborough’s most exclusive, fabulous private homes which will be open to the public just the once, on this day, for a tour. Tickets, at $65 each, will be limited of course, and will include a gourmet lunch which Providore in Martinborough have so kindly offered to do, and will be either in a vineyard (drumroll please – which will be Redbank Estate. Yes that’s right, here among our vines), or in one of two lovely parklike garden settings, with live music, and Martinborough wines for sale by the glass.

Honestly, the houses we have (and I can’t reveal the owners’ names at this stage but I can promise you many of them are prominent New Zealand identities) are breathtakingly beautiful. And all of them are just wonderful – from the award-winning architecturally designed (two by Chris Kelly, who worked with the great Renzo Piano) to the lovingly maintained properties of Martinborough’s founding families.

Here’s a sneak peek at one property we’ve photographed for the advertising flyer which will go out in the next couple of weeks:

In addition, the church, which is 150 years old and extremely lovely, will be decorated as for weddings. This will be a neat day, and I’m sure the tickets will be in demand quickly when they go on sale late this month. If you want to reserve some (a great stocking stuffer) get in touch with Helen at temuna@xtra.co.nz.

And thanks, of course, to our sponsors, Brackenridge Country Retreat & Spa, Property Brokers Ltd, Pain & Kershaw Ltd, and Julicher Estate.

 

New Book – “Wine-Lover’s Companion”

When I was a little girl growing up in Waipukurau I always wanted to be a journalist. There was another person in Waipukurau who was a journalist, Karl du Fresne, who went on to become editor of the Dominion. I won’t say he was a mentor, because that’s a stupid word, nobody was my mentor. But I will say that it was comforting growing up as the daughter of a farmer, where most young gels my age grew up to be wives of farmers, that there was someone I knew of who was a real, live journalist. Karl now lives not far from here, in Masterton, writes as a freeland journalist and writes a blog – http://www.karldufresne.blogspot.com

Last night I went to the launch of his new book, “The New Zealand Wine-Lover’s Companion, An A-to-Z Guide”. It is a beautifully produced little manual, published by one of this country’s most prestigious independent publishers, Craig Potton Publishing. The wraparound jacket is matt black with a printed gloss label which resembles a very finely designed wine label. Class, all class. The ISBN is 978-1-877517-12-9

Karl describes this book as “the sort of book I would have liked when I started taking an interest in wine. I found then that many of the books written about wine assumed that the reader already had a certain level of knowledge. They were often written in a language that newcomers to wine may have found puzzling, perhaps even intimidating, and they tended to bombard the reader with more technical detail than the casual wine enthusiast really needed. So with this book, I set out to fill what I perceived as a gap in the market.”

Quite. I find, even though I know a fair bit about wine, there are still those who like to write, and speak, about wine in a “I am considerably more knowledgeable about wine than thou” tone of pen or voice. Well, they are just tossers. They are like contemporary art experts. They are insecure and they are terrified about being questioned because they will be exposed as frauds, really not knowing as much as they think they know.

This book of Karl’s is a treasure. It is both informative and amusing and the perfect (I hate this phrase but it is very apt) stocking stuffer. I think it retails for about $30. Although I bought a copy, The Silver Fox was there, we were having a good time, and memory does not serve me well. This is not a book for wine snobs (then again, maybe it might take them down a peg or two, featuring as it does, a comic entry for cresta dore [I can't do an acute over the e on this blog] an old classic New Zealand wine about which English wine writer Christopher Fielden pronounced after tasting, “if  it smells of nothing and tastes of nothing it must be Cresta Dore”) but one for everyone - even beer drinkers – to enjoy. Cheers, Karl. 

Meanwhile, as I write this I look out with considerable pleasure at my garden which, despite the southerly today, has been progressing nicely. CCQC bought me a very smart lawnmower last weekend which went for a day before it died and has been sent back to the shop, but here are some photos of the garden, including the first roses to bloom:

See those hills? Those are Nga Waka a Kupe , the canoes of Kupe, and Meridian Energy, a taxpayer-owned electricity company, wants to put a windfarm up there with 45 turbines, each twice as high as the Auckland Harbour Bridge with blades twice the diameter of the Westpac Stadium. You can read about it this Sunday in my column in the Herald on Sunday.

 

Martinborough Syrah – James 2008

Last Sunday we had lunch with our friends the McCallums – Dawn and Neil who founded Dry River and built it into the most amazingly successful company. Neil is one of the greatest wine makers I’ve ever met, I think, and he’s also very funny. Great company. Dawn’s a marriage celebrant and one of my biking mates – The Pinot Pedallers. One of the interesting things Neil said – and his knowledge is astounding – was that about three years ago he wrote an article predicting New Zealand would get into the mess it is in now with sauvignon blanc, especially in Marlborough. Now he predicts we will soon be in a similiar mess with pinot noir, particularly also in Marlborough and Central Otago. New Zealanders, unfortunately, are such band-wagon jumpers.

Which is why we are pleased we have stuck to our guns and our gut instincts, and stayed with just one primary label, (that is, have not pushed cheaper wine out there under a secondary label) kept our tonnage down (ie bunch-dropped), kept the quality high, and not sacrified quality for quantity. Despite the urgings of those who think they know best, we have not rushed out and found “a distributor”, but carried on quietly selling our wine by word of mouth, and it is solidly selling. There is nothing worse than a distributor mucking up and selling cheap, because you’ll never get the price back up again.

Anyway, all this preamble brings me to our other diversification – the Syrah, from the hot Rhone corner of the vineyard. The 2008 Syrah, which Martinborough’s other master winemaker, Larry McKenna helped us make (and I’d have to say, he’s also the best winemaker I’ve ever met – but let’s face it, I know so little about making wine I’m easy to impress), has now been in the barrels for 18 months. So last Saturday we began racking it off to aerate it a little and freshen it up. We saved some to drink and it is drinking just lovely. Quite full on the mouth when you first take it in, but holding its flavour well all the way down. A good hearty syrah, I’d say, which will mature very well. We left it in two tanks for a couple of days then pumped it back into the barrels, and it will go into bottles, barely (if at all) filtered, very soon. This is very exciting – we have six barrels of this to be released, probably in about late 2010, 2011.What a lovely colour!