Wednesday 25th January 2023
We managed to book a last minute wine tour with Na Clachan wine tours. It was a bit odd as no availability was showing on their website two days ago, so Pete gave them a ring. The guy said he could add some more availability to the website and suddenly four available spaces appeared! So here we are. Along with one other German couple, who also booked very last minute. Apparently six others will join us for the afternoon.
Our first stop on the tour was Lawson’s Dry Hills Winery & Cellar Door. Here we tried 5 wines, all of which were very pleasant but none stood out enough for us to buy.
We then moved on to Rockferry, where we sat outside on a lovely shady balcony overlooking some fruit trees. I really enjoyed this tasting, as we got to try different vintage years of the same wines. For the Sauvignon Blanc, we all preferred the 2020 over the 2021, whereas with the Pinot rose it was very hard to tell the difference between the two vintages. Pete and I actually preferred the Sauvignon Blanc at Lawson’s Dry Hills though, so again we didn’t purchase anything.
By the time we’d finished our Rockferry tasting, Chris has driven into Blenheim to pick the 6 passengers joining us for the afternoon, and they were waiting in the minibus. We drove the short distance to Allan Scott, where we had a tasting of 3 wines while we ate lunch. We ordered the braised beef cheeks and the pork belly, both of which were excellent.
At Hunters, our next winery, the tasting was very slow. We had the first wine, a white sparking, and when the server returned she asked us how we enjoyed the rose. We were all very confused! She said the white wasn’t in stock so we’d tasted the rose, however someone on the table had some wine left and it was clearly white…. not sure quite was what was going on, but it was very good wine!
As they were being so slow we had to skip one of the 5 wines we were meant to be tasting. However, after they’d poured the final one, Pete and I went inside to buy a bottle of the sparkling wine to takeaway and they let us taste the wine that had been skipped. They also let us taste some of the rose they thought they’d served us earlier (we’re not generally rose drinkers but had a couple of excellent ones we loved in Australia) but we preferred the white.
We then went to Nautilus, where we sat indoors for the tasting. This was only winery where we had a choice of wines, we could select 4 out of 6 wines to try. Pete and I obviously shared so we got to taste all 6.
Our final winery was Framingham, which had a quirky little garden area with handmade wooden furniture. It was certainly a lovely environment for a wine tasting. At Framingham you can choose which wines you want to taste, but as we were on an organised tour we had to go with the recommended tasting.
We were dropped off back in Picton, and went to Scoozi Woodfire Pizza for some carbs to soak up all the alcohol. We shared a garlic bread and a prawn and pepperoni pizza, and the food was very good.
After dinner, we walked back to the hostel for an early night.
Emma and Pete’s Asian Adventure 