WIINTER ARRIVES TO MATAKANA

It has been a long time since my last blog as we were traveling back to NZ and had to recover from the trip. I must say doing 6 flights across the Pacific annually is getting to be a hard slog on the old bod. We go coach and take lots of drugs but it never gets any easier it seems.

We missed the fall grape picking at Hawks Nest but did get to taste our fermenting barrel samples with our wine making team today. The three blokes in the photo are Darryl (in the middle who owns Ascension Vineyards that is the nicest and neatest place in Matakana Valley) , Mike, and good ole Jeremy- our vineyard manager on the left. They are holding glasses with fresh samples from our fermenting 2008 "wine in progress'" They are pretending the "wine" tastes good but beleive me it does not as it is still undegoing Malalactic fermentation and tastes gassy and acid-like. Thank goodness we don't try to sell it as it tastes today!!!


As I have noted before we were first an orchard and we are into our fall harvest of mandarins, limes, and Asian persimmons--which is our cash crop. We sell a little fruit to locals from our honesty stall. You can see Jeremy toping up the bags of fruit for weekend customers. It is so nice that we can sell fruit by the roadside with no one in attendance. Honesty still rules here in rural NZ and this is a holiday weekend so we will have lots of roadside traffic and collect a lot of coins over the weekend I am sure.

The third shot is also one I just took today from the roadside of our vineyard showing how our Malbec grape leaves turn a lovely golden orange just weeks after the harvest. Gee, as I look closely at the photo, I must say it is a lovely shot. These three photos capture the essence of what we love about Matakana. Nice people to work, play, and socialize with; lots of fresh fruit, fish, meat, and other products from the clean land and sea; and finally the lovely land, sea, and sky vistas all around us. Come here yourself and you will truly understand why New Zealand gets called the God Zone by more and more people who come to visit and often even stay!!!

More soon;

Dr Jim and Miss Sandra