Timaru and Mt Cook

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Timaru

On March 21st Alina, Sam and I headed down to Timaru. It was a beautiful drive. It took us about 2 or 3 hours to get to Sam's parents' house. His parents took us out for dinner. I wanted fish of some sort and the only one on the menu was blue cod Cajun style. It was good, but definitely not Cajun. I also had a couple bites of Alina's lamb shanks and they were delicious.

On Sunday we went to the Timaru Wine and Food Festival. It was awesome. The wine was good, the food was good, and there was live music. The first few bands and singers were pretty good, but the last band The Black Seeds were on hit. We went to a wine and food pairing seminar that was awesome. For $5 we had like 5 or 6 glasses of wine and a full meal. I think they had planned it for more people, but our table was only half full so we got the same portions as if we were a full table so there was more to go around. As a bonus I snagged a bottle of Riesling Spatlese off another table on the way out that was 2/3 full. I gave that to Sam's Parents for graciously opening their house to us.

We came back on Monday which was a holiday for Central Otago (the state I'm in). On the way back we stopped at Mt Cook which is the highest mountain in NZ. We did a short walk of about an hour and a half to a great vantage point to see the face of the mountain. We also stopped at a couple of lakes on the way to Mt Cook. The lakes are a beautiful blue color because of sediment that was kicked up by the nearby glaciers. When you look at the water up close where its shallow it looks like a disgusting watered down milk, but from a distance the light filters through and makes it look blue.

We started harvesting grapes for the sparkling wine on Wednesday and Worked about 80 hours from Tuesday to Sunday. I think we crushed about 40 or 50 tons. I was mostly driving the fork lift picking up half ton bins of grapes and stacking them, setting up pumps and connecting hoses, lab work, and doing a lot of cleaning. I heard recently that wine making is 1% physical labor, 2% science, and 97% cleaning. That seems to be pretty true so far.

We have the day off today March 30th and we are going grocery shopping and then wine tasting.

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