Marlborough by bike

Hejsan allesamman!!

Right now I'm sitting in a rainy Wellington, on the southern tip of the North Island. Took the 3 hour ferry from Picton today leaving Marlborough and the South Island behind me (for now) still hoping to return to Central Otago to pic grapes at Felton Road (keep your fingers crossed).
Helen Mowitz if you're reading this, please send me some good Wellington hints :-)

I plan to leave wellington behind and head north quite fast, to Tongariro National Park and then on to Taupo, Napier and Martinborough before returning to Wellington. That is at least how my plans look tonight :-)

The last 3-4 days I've been spending in Beautiful Marlborough, the biggest wine area on New Zealand. I stayed in the small town of Renwick at a hostel called Watson's Way Backpackers, run by a retired kiwi couple. I arrived quite early on Saturday, but spent most of that day indoors and listening to audio books, felt tired for some reason. Sunday I rented a bike to tour some of the wineries in the area. Thought I'd start with the most famous one first "Cloudy Bay" which had a nice cellar door (lokal som ar oppen for provsmakning och inkop av vin) where you could taste most of there wines free of charge. The careful way in which I took notes of all the wines I tasted made the ladies that worked in the Cellar Door some what suspicious, so they asked me If I was a winemaker :-) guess I wasn't dressed nice enough to pass as a Sommelier :-)
They had a couple of nice wine best was Pelorus (a sparkling wine), Te Koko (Barrel Fermented Sauvignon Blanc) and of course there almost iconic Sauvignon Blanc. Next stop was for Lunch at Franz Herzog ( a Swiss) a beautiful little cellar door with a nice restaurant. I had Salmon with Chardonnay which both tasted very good, especially the salmon. Then I tried three of there other wines for 10 NZ dollars, a Viognier, a Pinot Noir and a Bordeaux Blend. To my taste it was only the Bordeaux blend that was any good, the other wines was not good enough for there price.

Biked on towards the next cellar door Nautilus Estate, where I tried several really good wines among them was a decent sparkling, a nice fruity Sauvignon Blanc and three really good Pinot's.
Deciding that was it for the day I biked back to the hostel.

Next morning i biked up to Isabelle Estate, where i got a quick tour of the winery and then a tasting of all there wines. I have to honestly say that the wines from them that I've tasted before in Sweden seemed better, maybe they've changed something in the wine making?? The wines was still good though but not with the same power as before.
I took a lunch break at the hostel, eating some leftovers from yesterday, before I biked on towards Staete Landt. This winery is run by a Dutch (hollandskt) couple, and is very small so they don't have a cellar door but I called early in the morning and got an appointment for the afternoon. Ruud (the owner/winemaker) showed me around and let me taste all of his wines. Really very nice wines, good concentration of flavours and fruit and well balanced. He also explained that he didn't like to put all of his wines into screw cap bottles (flaska med skruvkork), which is more or less mandatory (mer regel an undantag) in New Zealand. All the wines where of equally good quality, but i was most impressed with his Pinot Gris (the best one in NZ so far), Riesling Auslese (beautifully light and clean) and the Syrah which smelled of freshly ground black pepper.
After that interesting visit I had to paddle my way back home, made a Udon noodel soup for dinner which I thought came out quite good.

On Tuesday I took the bus to Blenheim, where I had a real challenge carrying all my stuff from the bus station to the hostel, so much in fact that I decided to purposely leave a some of my old clothes behind this morning. My day in Blenheim did not involve any wine at all, instead i spent quite a few hours at a Internet place fixing some of the pictures I took at Able Tasman. Then I went for a long walk up some of the hills/mountains on the south east side of the city. The walk was well worth the effort sins I got a great view of the whole valley and took some nice photos.

Tomorrow I'm going to meet up with Asa, och prata lite svenska, a Swedish girl that I met on the bus to Nelson.

Resan continues!
/Martin