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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

It’s been a wee while between blogs. Life gets busy enough at this time of the year without my going and making it busier. I decided I missed journalism too much, so I’m back writing features, as well as my weekly column, for the Herald on Sunday. The first one will – all going according to plan – be published this coming Sunday, but I do get very nervous and stressed when I step back into feature writing again, and wonder why. I’m always sure I’ll be exposed as a fraud.

Meanwhile, I feel the urge to give this Hawke’s Bay company a really good plug for the quality of both their product, and their service – Gourmet Direct. You order on line, or by telephone, and your order is delivered to your door. They’ll often phone to check all is okay. It’s personal, friendly and very satisfying.

I buy most of my meat from Kate (who owns and runs the show) and I can assure you the quality is truly superb. No, it’s not the cheapest meat on the market, but there’s no waste, and I believe if you pay a little more you think carefully about how you prepare it, and you won’t eat it every night. So that’s better for your health.

About two months ago, I bought on special a tenderloin (eye) fillet. It was vacuum-packed, and nearing the end of its three-month aging when I bought it. I think it cost me about $110 and weighed about 2.5kg. I wanted it for a dinner party for 10 people, but that wasn’t happening for another three or four weeks, and I didn’t want to freeze it so I phoned Kate and discussed it with her. She asked if I had a beer fridge, or similar (yes, in the winery) and advised me to put it in there where the door isn’t being opened and shut all the time. I did that, and turned it down to really cold. Then on the night in question I cooked it the Stephanie Alexander way:

Two hours before dinner remove meat from fridge. An hour and a half before dinner heat oven to 220C. One hour before dinner put meat in oven and cook for 20 minutes for rare (which I did) or 30 minutes for medium. Remove meat, roll in a double sheeet of silver foil and keep warm in warming drawer.

What could be easier than that? It was absolutely divine. When I brought it to the table, one of the guests, Farmer Stu, who used to breed Angus cattle, said “I hope that’s Angus”.

“Of course it is,” I replied.

“How do you know?” he retorted.

“Because it was on the packaging. Pure Angus Prime. I only buy my beef from Gourmet Direct.”

Well, after he’d finished his meal he said it was the best beef he’d ever eaten and he would dream about it for the rest of his life. You can’t get better praise than that for beef.

By the way, there was enough left over to feed the QC and I for two more nights.

I have never had any second rate product from Gourmet Direct. I don’t buy pork from them, because we grow our own, but I do buy venison and it’s top quality. I buy lamb and it’s terrific. I have bought pheasant for a treat, and I bought a packet of 25 frozen, prebake croissants which you defrost overnight then next morning bake for breakfast and everyone thinks are homemade. They have all sorts of deli goods – in fact an order form to drool over. Don’t take my word for it, get on line at www.gourmetdirect.com.

They have a wide range of poultry goods, fantastic sausages, and I have bought delicious duck, but I guess I won’t be able to face eating duck for a while because our little family is out and about now:

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.

One baby duckling died. Sad, but not as bad as I expected. On Saturday Pip became more and more moribund as the day wore on. We could tell she was trying to coax the ducklings out of the kennel, so we built a little ramp so they’d be able to get in and out, and I noticed she was very quiet when we were working around her. Too quiet. When I picked her up and examined her, she’d lost a huge patch of feathers from her breast. Then I examined my hands – mites all over me! Mites look like moving pinpricks on your hands and once you spot them, you start scratching all over. Luckily I still had some mite powder from Smitty’s ‘ride from hell’ down in the horse truck from Auckland, so Colin gave her a good dusting and we put her back with the ducklings. But a few hours later she was still not good. I noticed her drinking copious amounts of water and breathing really heavily, then not long before it was dark she’d gathered the ducklings under her and gone  to sleep with her face slumped down in her food. I didn’t think she’d live through the night, and worried how I’d raise three baby ducklings.

But, next morning she was perky as ever, but with only two live ducklings. One was pushed out into the cold, and dead. Maybe she did this on purpose. Maybe she calculated that one duckling had to be sacrificed to save herself and the two other ducklings, otherwise they would all perish. Animals do this. We were so delighted to see our beautiful Pip alive and well we got her out of that kennel into the sunshine and on to the grass. She loved that, and relished being free again after patiently sitting on those eggs for four long weeks. Now she’s in a new run, with a wooden wine box for a house, covered and protected by Smitty’s winter cover, and really mothering her two ducklings.

Meanwhile, I trekked up to see the two equine members who are shedding their winter coats, and Smitty as usual looks like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis. His old coat gets a bit tangled but I don’t comb it off because it offers some warmth as we creep into spring, and yet the weather is too hot for him to wear his heavy winter cover (and, being the gentleman he is, he’s loaned it to Pip).

The horses are as fat as butter, up there in Farmer John’s hill paddock, all 110 acres of it, because the clover’s growing faster than Smitty, Lily or the ewes and lambs can eat it. Most of Farmer John’s lambs are Dorset Down cross, hence the smudgy-black markings. Note how big this lamb is, and it hasn’t even been weaned yet. You hear so-called gourmet “experts’ moaning about how New Zealand lamb is not really lamb because it’s too big to be lamb. Well, what would they have us do? Rip lambs from their mothers’ breasts and send them to slaughter?

I love the way the ewes and lambs watch Taja and me so suspiciously as we walk up over the brow of the hill:

Then scarper when we get too close for comfort.

As if dear old Taja would hurt them anyway. I can trust her with anything – I bet she’d pick up one of the ducklings in her gentle mouth without harming it.

And here’s the new baby: