Good vinebrations
Tom Williams takes a cycling tour of New Zealand’s wineries Bicycles and wine, on paper at least, do not make the best partners. Wasn’t it Virgil who said that good vines love open hills? Well bikes, in my experience, are considerably less keen on them. So how my girlfriend convinced me that our tour of New Zealand’s wine country would be incomplete without cycling around the Hawke’s Bay wineries is beyond me. We had planned our trip using Footprint’s Wine Travel Guide to the World and, so far, had had great fun in Marlborough drinking Montana’s breathtaking Sauvignon Blancs. Hawke’s Bay, in the North Island, was supposed to be a contrast; and, with this unusual combination of epicurism and exercise, it looked like it was going to prove more of one than I had anticipated.
New Zealand tends to make people think of Lord of the Rings (its topographical variety made it the perfect stand-in for Middle Earth in the movies) and of bungee-jumping. Cycling is certainly not on many people’s activity list when they visit. But it is a popular sport there and it did not take long for us to find a Hawke’s Bay-based company called On Yer Bike to loan us bikes and provide the essential food and maps to make our day a success.
We set off from their base on one of those warm, midsummer days that Kiwis get in March and it soon became clear that this was not to be the challenge it might have been. Hawke’s Bay is, pace Virgil, mercifully flat. Everywhere you look there are vine prairies, deep-green rows stretching out towards low, undulating hills behind which craggy, rough-hewn mountains rear up in the distance. It is the kind of scenery that keeps even the most unenthusiastic cyclist going.
After 40 minutes or so at our rather leisurely pace along deserted roads — New Zealand has such a small population that cars in the country are few and far between — we reached our first cellar door at Ngatarawara. The bottle-filled wood cabin was looked after by a small, rather feisty grey-haired lady who, within seconds of our arrival, was uncorking bottles, pouring wines and enthusiastically going through their vinous biographies. It was a bit of a shame to have to spit out such pleasant wines but, with plenty of cycling ahead of us, our options were limited.
To get to the next estate, Hatton’s, we cycled through vineyards where workers prepared for the imminent harvest. Their weathered faces did not register our presence as they pruned the vines busily and we cycled by unnoticed, arriving at the winery in less than an hour. Hatton’s cellar door was pretty basic — a couple of bum-splinter picnic benches in a converted barn — but their wines were anything but, with Gordon Ramsay numbered among their fans. Their Tahi, a ripe, richly concentrated Bordeaux blend, is on the wine-list at his restaurants for around £70 a bottle and, having tasted it, it’s not hard to see why.
By now the exercise had left us both hungry and ready for lunch. We headed back to the vines, taking the opportunity to cycle between the rows with childlike abandon, and then sat down between them to eat the wraps and fresh strawberries that we had been provided with, plus a grape or two, cheekily stolen from the ripening bunches around us. Under the blue, cloud-streaked skies, it was hard to believe that New Zealand could get any better than this.
We would have stayed there all day had we not had one more winery to visit, and we had to cycle fast to get there. Sadly, Sileni turned out not to be worth the ride. Its cellar door looked more like a Bond villain’s lair than a winery and, inside, the heaving tasting bar and souvenir shop were modelled on one of those Californian tourist traps that dot the Napa Valley. Unfortunately, so was the flabby, fruity and forgettable wine.
It was a shame to end on this low note when there were other wineries to visit, but we were out of time; we had arranged to meet the On Yer Bike truck in Sileni’s car-park to return our bikes. The tour had been enormous fun and the wines mostly excellent but now, having sniffed, swirled, spat and, above all, cycled our way around the region, it was time to get back to our hotel for a well-deserved rest and perhaps a bottle of wine to savour.
The World Travel Guide to Wine is published by Footprint (£19.99).
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION VISIT: www.hawkesbaynz.com
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