Wine Tasting

Today was our chance to be the finest wine snobs around. We were picked up at 10 am by a nice lady who runs a winery tour company with her husband. She drives people around to wineries all day every day. Not too shabby of a life if you ask me. Anyways, we got on her bus along with 3 girls from England and 1 lady from Australia and made our way to the first winery by 10:15 am. Nothing like an eye opener.

 

This was the first winery we hit- Wither Hills. The building for wine tasting and receptions was new and really nice. The wine here was pretty good but my favorite part was the front area where they had a "vine library". The library had small rows of grapes with a different type on each row. They let us go row to row and taste the difference in the grapes. The picture below shows a few of the rows with Kristin looking for grapes.



A close up of some of the grapes. They didn't use pesticides so we could pick them right off the plant and taste them. Most of them were pretty tasty but there were a few that still needed some ripening and were pretty bitter.

That's us at the first wine tasting of the day. Most places gave us a list of the wines they had for tasting and then we could score them on a scale from 1 to 10 so that we could remember what we liked.

A view from the top of the winery. I could handle living here.

A panoramic shot of the same thing.

Me with Chase and showing off the background.

This is their basement cellar where they have row after row of wine barrels. Each of these holds enough wine to fill way over 200 bottles (I forgot the exact number- blame it on the wine).

The next stop was at Lawson's which is a family owned place but still pretty big.

That's Chase flirting with the hostess. Typical.

They had one kind of wine that was the sweetest I have ever had. It tasted more like Kool-aid than wine. Of course this made Erin very happy.

I met the winery's dog named Tomi so of course they made me take a picture with the article about her because we have the same name.

That's the outside. Nothing too special as far as the building but they probably had the best wine of all the places we went.

This is the 3rd place we went before lunch. Don't ask me how to pronounce the name but it's a cool little place that's owned by a younger couple. The owner was the one who served us the wine which was different from most places where you never meet the owners. Oh, and she has two sets of young twin girls. It seems hard enough to have 1 set of twins let alone 2.

This is where they do their wine making

And this is the sign for where we ate lunch- Wairau River. The wine was Ok but we had some really good steak burgers that made us forget about the wine temporarily.

This was our first stop after lunch- Bouldevines. The wine here wasn't anything special but they made a lot of other stuff including liquor, olive oil, and other sauces. Pretty cool.

Just another sign for the same place.

This was the olive oil tasting. I had no idea there were so many flavors of olive oil.

This is a view from the back. Supposedly drunk people have been known to jump in the pond. You couldn't pay me to jump in that.

This is a view from the Fromm Winery. The wine was fine and the people were nice but it was probably my least favorite stop. I liked the view though.

This was definitely our most unique stop at the Moa Brewery. We needed a break from the wine and this place was perfect. We sampled their beer and the guy serving us was from North Carolina and has been living here for the last 6 years and working at the brewery. It was kind of nice to have someone to talk about college basketball with.

Our final stop was at a chocolate factory. We got to see them make the chocolate right in front of us. And since everywhere else gives out samples around here, so did they.

This was my favorite view of the day so I saved it for last. Wish you were here? It's amazing!

That's all for today. Tomorrow we're going to try to visit Picton and the Marlborough Sound if the weather will cooperate (it might rain). If it rains, we'll just have to find a back up plan. If anything exciting happens it'll end up here sooner or later. I'm off to bed. Goodnight.