Aussie, the driver who had driven friends Kevin and Tim on their visit to the South Island some years ago and nicknamed because he comes from Western Australia, picked us up with a delightful lady from California, Pat, and one of his co-workers, Campbell, who had just joined the Malrborough Travel Company.
We headed off in the van, the five of us, for three wineries about 930AM. The firsts stop was Saint James Winery, a pleasant place started as an apple orchard making fancy chutneys and jams before changing into a winery. Now it is a major player in the pack of sauvignon blanc makers. We tasted their range, particularly liking their pinot noir and their sauvignon.
From there it was Framingham, which makes the sauvignon blanc that Marlborough uses on their boat to go with the lunch of mussels. The sauvignon blanc was superb with the mussels. It is clearly a food wine. We tasted the reislings, not much to either of our tastes, their montepulciano, which is very nice and has a hint of Italy, but no Italian terroir, about it. The pinot noir was lovely and their dessert wine won Pat’s heart.
The third winery, one of the area’s largest, we believe, was Wairau, named after the local river. Very nice, but we’d say it was generally our third choice. Perhaps our tastes were a bit jaded by this time, having tasted about 15 wines over the 120 minute tour.
Nonetheless, all the wines were superb. We were not into the reislings much, John decided that Framingham’s viognier made him realize that not all viogneirs are to be avoided, and the chardonnays are not like California’s or Australia’s They are not upfront like the Aussie wines and not as full or buttery as California’s. They are much more burgundian or even northern alpine Italian in style.
We drove then to Havelock, the town where Marlborough Tours docks its cruiser. We lunched at Slip Inn in Havelock. Ben had a broccoli, cauliflower and zucchini cream soup, while John had a Thai beef salad--once again no chili had set foot in that kitchen. A nice salad but nothing Thai about it except for a few fried noodles.
Then it was off to the boat to be joined by another group, making our tour about 15 people. The boat is good sized, probably about 60 feet, built as a catamaran so it is able to go over the lines of the mussel farms. We cruised down the Pelorus Sound past hills of trees with occasional vacation homes, some with all the links to civilization except roads.
Our goal, the mussel farms, line the sides of parts of the sound. The mussels hand on ropes from the lines attached to floats and are harvested into huge ton-sized bags for quick processing and flash-freezing and shipment overseas. We enjoyed big bowls of mussels, most with a bit of lemon or nothing at all, but wasabi and Thai sweet chili sauce were available. Fresh mussels caught within hours area real treat. Particularly the large green shelled NZ mussels which grow nowhere else in the world.
We tasted some flash frozen ones after the bowls of fresh. While good, even excellent, there is no comparison to the mussels right out of the sea.
The trip back to land was in rain-showers but even then it was a good time, chatting with the mostly Aussie tourists from places like Adelaide, the Deep North and Canberra.
We dined at Le Cafe in Picton last night. Ben had a gudjon, a white fish, with vegetables, while John had a bowl of oricchiete with olives and tomato sauce. We began with some grilled, cooked on a hot griddle, asparagus with sweet-ish ham and a ciabatta John had a First Landing sauvigon blanc to start and we drank a bottle of pinot noir from Serenis winery. A very lovely table outside looking at the sound, the mountains and their cloud-shrouded summits.
After dinner we stayed for a small cabaret of Brazilian music. While the pieces were good, and probably the players good, the group really needs manager or director to rehearse them who can assess the sounds they make. Not the greatest yet, but they could be much better. We wondered what a young woman, obviously the local paper’s critic, at a nearby paper will write about them.
We watched a bit of the local news before crashing to sleep. It is AWFUL. There wasn’t a story of substance among the first 15 minutes of the program. Death--a kid killed in a train tunnel while putting graffiti on the walls with his wailing mother and aunt, and a friend who blithely remarked that “he died doing what he loved!” Loss--another piece on a locket full of 1949 birthday pictures found in a Wellington house by the new owner, led to a story about a 83-year-old getting them back and promising to take better care of them. And this is news? Worse than WPXI. The newspapers are the same.
Oh, well.
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