Cheers!
Hawke’s Bay is a well known grape growing region. I took a tour this afternoon with a small group - a Scottish couple, an American couple and a young German. The first winery looked beautiful - the building used to be on the edge of town and housed “retiring” monks. The building was carved into six pieces, moved to a higher location and is now the home of the Mission Winery. We sampled four wines and enjoyed them.
The second winery was much smaller and we were made really welcome by the part-owner who treated us to six wines and a humorous and informative chat about his business and wine in general going into, for instance, the history of “Shiraz”. Apparently this was a place in Persia visited by the crusaders and an Anglo-German knight took cuttings of grapes before he returned to Europe. He stopped off in the Rhone valley, planted the cuttings, decided he rather liked it there and didn’t return to England.
I bought a bottle of red and one of white for us to treat ourselves to later.
The afternoon ended with a trip up to Te Mata Peak, 339 metres above sea level and a wonderful vantage point for views throughout three hundred and sixty degrees over the whole area.
Jean
… but unfortunately not at Taupo where they would have netted me NZ $10,000. This is the Napier Crazy Golf though quite a tricky one as these things go with various cambers and tiers which mean that embarrassingly for a golfer of my calibre the ball can occasionally roll all the way back to the start. Dave