Otago Living
Oh yes grapes, been picking them for well over a week now don’t you know. Anyway who tells me I have never done a hard/honest days work in my life can officially fuck off. You pick up to 9 hours a days, with breaks for morning and afternoon smokos and lunch. So far we have picked chardonnay at Cornish Point, Riesling and Pinot Noir at Calvert and all three at Elms. And this includes the famous Block 3 there. And I’ve eaten them all. The variation in taste of the Pinot is particularly interesting: Calverts is sweet and jammy, while those of Block 3 are brooding with depth and intensity, echoes of the wine it is to become. We were told to be ‘less fussy’ in Block 3 because these are some of the best Pinot Noir grapes in the world. Gareth encouraged us to taste the shrivled grapes that we may have thrown away otherwise and they burst with roasted currant and raisin flavour. Not rotten or affected by bird peck, these are ever-so-slightly over-ripe and enrich the final product. The grapes also give you a welcome burst of glucose if you are flagging during a session, by the end of which gloves and top and face and in my case the center of my glasses where I push them back on my nose are sticky with this amazing juice. That and every bobble your clothes have are covered in spiderweb.
But these are great days, despite the unpredictable weather. Jerry, the grizzled veteran picker who shares my TV room and kitchen, tells me it is because of sub-cyclonic conditions coming from Australia which means we are experiencing a south-westerly rather than the more usual nor-westerlies which pulls in cold air from the South Oceans. So it’s the bloody Aussie’s fault again. Andrew expanded on this during smoko, as we looked out accross the basin on a particularly nasty day. Three weather systems pile into it, along the Kawarua Gorge to the West, from Alexandra and Clyda along the Clutha from the East and North from Wanaka, all of which run slap bang in to each other over the lake. From our vantage point you can see each of them, particularly from the West given our proximity. During picking occaisionally this grey mass looms out over us, accompannied by a light spray of rain. Only once has this threat manifestated itself, sending us running for the hut and eventually me for home. More often than not it the cloud that retreats, sucking its eldritch tentacles back up Mt Difficulty and back along the gorge. It is the mountains that deny the storms, only ones of peculiar vehemence breach their defensive line, and usually are then greatly disappated. You know at times like this Queenstown and the West Coast are getting a proper soaking, but the rain shadow formed by the Southern Alps keeps Otago dry for the most part. It is another reason this region is a such a special place for growing grapes, and it is fascinating to see it at such close hand. But it requires human diligence too.
And all this means the frost fighting continues apace. I don’t now how much sleep you get on frost-watch but I’m sure it isn’t much, but it didn’t stop Mike (from another vineyard up at Lowburn) drinking jugs and doing shots of Chatreuse at the Kareoke night on Thursday. It took me about three attempts to remind him and once he remembered the look on his face made we wish I hadn’t. I’m not sure he had a Good Friday. There is a genuine comarderie working at Felton. You’re picking alongside Gareth’s Mum, Diane and Nigel’s (the owner of Felton) nephew Andrew. Nigel occaisionally cooks you lunch, and you get food at both breaks too. Owen Calvert, who guess what, owns Calvert vineyards, flew in with his family at the start of the week and picks with you, before offering you a beer at the end of the bay (only for Gareth to tell you you don’t deserve the beer yet and make you lug around a huge grape bin). You’re fitting in with people than have been working there many months and years yet they are all eager to know your name and hear your story. I have a little UK contingent too, Ann and Bruce. Ann like me is blogging, but she’s doing it for Harper’s and Queen so I guessing the content may be a little different. Bruce has been here four years and it shows: it took him telling me he was a Brit for me to recognise it, so infected his accent has been by the local one. There’s Manu and Marian, the French who have offered me work in Muscadet for their harvest, and Fabian the mad Swiss from the Valais. There is also Andrew, a Californian ex-sommelier now learning viticulture and Martin a Swedish sommelier. After seemingly endless interviews where I would expound my philosophy of wine only to find it fall on stoney ground. I began to doubt it myself but here at least I have found some like-minded fellows. We all come from similar backgrounds, and in Andrew’s case from a wine bar/shop the same as me (‘Awesome’ as he put it) and all seem to have a similar tase for the more leftfield wines. From them at least I can draw inspiration and see a direction for me to go within the industry that at the moment seems to have spat me out (he says as he picks grapes for one of the finest wineries in the world). But quite frankly I am grateful for that. It is by chance I come here, but it seems to me that I should be here. I only know that I sent three emails to New Zealand, one to Marlborough, one to Canterbury and one to here and it was here that replied and said yes. And after the journey I have had, and the reception I have received now I’ve got here I grateful no-one else bothered to reply to those pleading emails. I’m yet to visit Canterbury but Marlborough sruck me as a bit boring. After the giddy excitement of crossing the Wairau and first night in Blenheim, which I would equate with seeing the Hollywood sign for the first time, the environs don’t grab you. The vinification too is far more commercial than Otago. Too commercial according to the rumblings coming out of the region, after over-production in 2008 and a reported 40million litres of unsold wine in tanks. Growers have been told to thin their crop this year and are being offered substantially less per ton than years before. Marlborough isn’t quite the goose that laid the golden egg it once was, and while it still makes stunning wine, one begins to wonder whether it’s Sauvignon can continue to excite, particularly when you taste something like the Neudorf one I had in Nelson. IMO it was streets ahead. So I ended up here, and here there is still the sense of the frontier, of a wine region still establishing itself amongst a landscape of immense and beautiful proportions. Here you touch the hem of nature everyday and truely appreciate your place within it. Here is a spirituality I had lost back home. And after so much angst in previous employment suddenly there is an unfamilar sensation: that of working and living simultaneously.
