Wine-ing

Are you tired of hearing about the beauty yet? Are you tired of hearing about the magical train ride and the fast-moving clouds and the pleated velvet hills? You might want to skip this entry, then.

Monday, to round out the Queen’s birthday weekend, we went towards the sun: east to Martinborough and to Greytown. It was supposed to rain all along the west coast, so we headed to the Waiarapa, the winegrowing country across the hills towards the other coast. This is how we’ve planned each trip: by consulting the weather to find out which direction we’d find sun. Even as we do it, we laugh about it—imagine trying to decide whether to go to Montgomery Mall or Pentagon City Mall based on whether it would be raining in Arlington or Rockville.

That morning on our sunrise beach walk, Michael and I had wondered together why we didn’t take these day trips when we lived in DC. Surely there were lovely things to see around DC, weren’t there? But the lovely things were often quite a long drive away, through ugly sludge of inner and then outer suburbs. And then there was the worry that once you got to whatever sleepy lovely little country town you were escaping to, you’d find that in fact it was mobbed, packed with other city dwellers also escaping one another to head into the country. (To be fair, we were also trying to make great use of living in Washington DC, one of the most wonderful cities in the US, where there were endless opportunities inside city limits. And we did fantastic things in the city itself.)

We have not yet found much suburban sludge in New Zealand, although we assume that we’d find it outside Auckland. We left Paekakariki at 10, stopping in Porirua to buy paint for the house and then drove through drizzle around the harbour and into the hills that separate the coast from the plains. Up up up we climbed, on State Highway 2, a tiny twisting major artery with a chicken wire fence separating you from the cliff-face that is your certain death. It was a terrifying and magnificently beautiful journey (and it is here on these narrow twisty roads that we have discovered our propensity for car sickness). There are pictures today from the summit at 555 metres. Then down down down and into farm-covered planes in the bright and warm sunshine, the cobalt skies stretching out forever over the grass or vine-covered patchwork. We stopped at the heart of the region, Martinborough, a place known for its cafes and chic shops. From the descriptions, you’d have expected something like Annapolis or Concord Mass or whatever your image of sweet boutique world might be. I had in my mind dozens of cafes, beautiful little shops, a day of wandering with perhaps the too-well-heeled Wellington set, all packing into little towns on the holiday weekend. HA! How North American of me.

Martinborough is a tiny village. It has a handful of cafes (half were closed for the holiday) and a scattering of shops (ditto). We crowded into the several open places with the dozens of other people (many of them on motorcycles) who had also opted for this day trip—or maybe we were just eating lunch with the locals there. It was, I suppose, everything we expected it to be, only shrunk by 90%--perhaps quite like the country itself, really. Next we headed to Greytown, which has the longest stretch of wooden Victorian buildings in New Zealand (now there’s a record to hold on to). Here we wandered through shops (all open for the holiday, but closing at the Sunday time of 4 or 5) and admired NZ art and Balinese antiques and lovely smells from French bakeries. On our way out of town, Rob asked us to stop at the Schoc chocolate store -- a tiny little shop by the side of the road just out of Greytown that was miraculously still open even as the late-autumn sun was setting. Rob picked up a book called Chocolate Therapy which he had sold in gourmet stores in Oregon and got excited that it was signed. He turned to the man leaning out of the chocolate kitchen and asked him whether he was one of the authors. And, because it’s New Zealand, he was. This man is a psychotherapist turned chocolatier, and he came out from the kitchen and began pulling out drawers of a tiny little spice or tea cabinet, each unlabeled box containing small pieces of one or another chocolate. He had us taste single varietals and name the different notes we found there (the South American chocolates were earthy but Eastern chocolates had more floral and citrus notes—or the other way around). He found out where we were from and talked about the talks he had given at the Smithsonian. So here we were, in this tiny little village in the middle of New Zealand, talking to a man who had travelled the world tasting and lecturing about chocolate, and who knew more about the subject than anyone I had ever met. We drove off into the sunset (literally), ready to climb the hills with excellent chocolate in our bellies. And then, in case you needed the story to have a happy ending, we arrived home to our big lump of a dog snoozing on the chaise, we lit a roaring fire, and fell asleep listing to the rhythmic sound of the sea. Happy queen’s birthday to us all!