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.

 

What a Star

One duckling is all we have left. He or she was one week old yesterday, and he or she has been named Star. The second one died on the third night, and Star would have departed this mortal coil also if I hadn’t realised that Pip was treating them like baby bantams, not ducklings. Blimmin’ teenage mothers! This last remaining duckling was looking very sickly, falling down, eyes rolling back, so I brought him inside and squirted some water down his throat with a syringe, put some water in the kitchen sink and dumped him in it (I’m presuming it’s a male). Well, that revived him! He paddled around, dunked his little beak in, shook his head, stopped his plaintive peeping, and perked up immediately.

I let him get thoroughly drenched then took him back out to Pip to be warmed under her feathers again (she just sits on him all the time). Then I whipped into PG Wrightsons and bought a huge bag of chick starter meal and force-fed him some of that until he got the hang of eating. Now he’s thriving.

Meanwhile, it’s back to the serious business of running the vineyard. Budburst is well and truly upon us. As you look out across the vines, you can see the haze of green as the leaves start to colour up and so far we’ve had no major frosts but that doesn’t mean we’ll escape. Snow’s forecast for tomorrow on the Rimutaka Ranges. Today the wind is fair whipping across the property; CCQC’s out on the tractor mowing that spring grass and I’m feeling pretty satisfied with some of my winter planting, like these examples of the 500 daffodil bulbs I put in.

And before we went abroad we planted our orchard which is now blooming. Apple blossom is my favourite, quite delicately pink at the same time the pale green leaves appear

and this is the crabapple blossom

In between the pavers this sweetie bravely flowers

And of course there’s no show without my three devoted companionsAnyone would think they were deliberately colour coordinated. Imagine how crazy this is going to look when I have following me one dog, one cat, one bantam rooster, one bantam hen, and one Peking duck.

 

Birth Notice

Born today, in a cold easterly, to Pip and Squeak (not their real names), triplets!

Mother and babies doing well, thanks to midwives DC and Taja (who is so curious but thankfully well past her duck-retrieving days). Kete refusing to have anything to do with this baby-producing nonsense and asleep in her basket. Squeak (not his real name) fluffing around the perimeters, squawking about how a man can’t get a decent cigar out in the country. Gone off to skite to Winston (hasn’t actually seen what his offspring look like yet). Phoned the QC who tried his best to sound excited, but I suspect didn’t really think it was important enough to hold up the nation’s judicial affairs and muttered something that sounded suspiciously like “cluck, cluck”. 

I’d just about given up on those eggs. I thought they were infertile and this morning I heard Kete yowling. Thinking she might just have nabbed a newly hatched duckling I thought I’d better check. She actually had a half-drowned fieldmouse, which I let her keep, and when I went to check on Pip, there she was, the proud mother of one fluffly, yellow, peeping duckling. So cute.

About two hours later I could hear more peeping so I lifted Pip up and she went berserk, and the third one was still pecking its way out of the shell, so I’ve left them to it. I shall take photos as soon as I can get her off her little darlings without her flying into a post-natal rage.

Any suggestions for names? And not Huey, Dewey and Louie. Maybe Snap, Crackle and Pop?

 

Chablis

I’ve always loved the flinty taste of Chablis wines which, though made from chardonnay grape, you can not replicate anywhere else in the world because of the special chalky terroir which only occurs in this part of Burgundy. Although, as our guide at Domaine Laroche told us, these deposits do surface for a very small area in England. How boring it would be if they were everywhere.

Chablis is a very pretty town, with leaning walls which you’d never get away with building here -

and lovely colours -

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We were taken to Domaine Laroche for a tasting and tour of the cellar. They also have an amazing old wooden pressoir, made totally of three oak trees, transported there by hand centuries ago by monks (as this was started by monks and used to be a monastery). It was difficult to get photos of this incredible wine press which is still used once a year by Domaine Laroche, as a kind of party piece, but I took several snaps to give a general idea of how it works. Even the screw part is wooden.

The show-winery is beautifully laid out with antique picking baskets, barrels, and such.

On our drive back to the barge, James took Colin and me to one of Domaine Laroche’s grand cru vineyards as we were interested in their viticulture. No birds! No birds! How lucky they are.

See how old the vines are, from the thickness of these trunks. I guess they were about six weeks off vintage when we were there, and it was already very hot, some days it was 47.8C!

We loved this visit. It’s great to see other styles of viticulture, and I wish we didn’t have a bird problem in New Zealand. It was so amusing also to learn that the French government dictates the start date for picking grapes, and before that date no one must begin picking! I can’t imagine New Zealand growers taking any notice of that, but that’s the condition of having appellations in France.

And for dinner that night? We began with baked goats cheese en croute with red onion jam, wrapped in jambon, followed by fillet of beef with glazed shallots and spicey couscous. The cheeses were:

St Maure de Touraine, a soft, nutty and slightly salty goats’ cheese from the Loire, rolled in black wood ash, with a straw in the centre which if cut brings bad luck.

Morbier, from the Franche-Conte, a mild and buttery cows’ milk cheese with a pungent, yeasty aroma, containing a thin layer of ash in the middle separating the morning milking from the evening milking.

Reblochon, known as the tax evasion cheese as it is made using the second milking which used to take place after the tax inspector had measured the milk quota for the day, a soft cheese from the Savoie with a mild fruity taste.

And then, of course, in the French way, the desert, which was lemon and blueberry tart.

The wines were Chablis 1er Cru ‘Les Beauroys’, from the 1er Cru vineyard of Les Beauroys, where the grapes are harvested first so that the wine doesn’t get too heavy, it’s naturally the least acidic of the 1er crus. And Crozes Hermitage, a large appellation which covers almost 2500 acres, across 11 villages. It has a smoky flavour and is predominately made using the Syrah grape, but can be blended with Grenache and Cinsault. It is a powerful, tannic red, peppery with raspberries and blackberries on the finish.

The next day, it was up on deck again, hard at work relaxing.