Wednesday, December 3, 2014

Vineyards Of Blenheim

After two wonderful weeks in Christchurch, I flew on to Blenheim to stay with Dennis and Chris' brother, Jon.
Above Christchurch

Jon owns a vineyard that is contracted out to a winery.

He has 10,323 vines and over the course of the week I spent there, I had the pleasure of meeting them all.... twice.

We started with the job of wire lifting. It gets quite windy in Blenheim. The wires help protect the canes from snapping off in the wind. It took Chris, Jon, and I two days to lift all the wires. Later on, another set of wires get lifted. The wire lifting wasn't too difficult, but what I hadn't realized was how much walking we'd be doing. Chris and I measured the longer rows. It was 250 meter and took up an average of 10 minutes to do.

Between the work at the vineyard, Chris and I had a few excursions. One day we spent time out in Picton. We caught sight of one of the ferries that goes between the north and south island.

We had also seen this place earlier. I just had to eat there. It was too funny to see a place called Kentucky in a place so far from Kentucky. It was a fish and chips kind of place. My official impression was while the food was enjoyable, the most Kentuckian thing about it was the name.

We spotted a WWI monument as well. In the States, monuments tend to commemorate WWII. But in New Zealand, they all seem to be related to WWI. Even the smaller towns have monuments. It is quite clear that New Zealand gave many men to the Great War.

1 comments :

Anonymous said...

Interesting to see how Brancott get their wines made. Those memorials are so sad Every small town you go through in NZ has a memorial, all with a long list of names. I never asked an older person, but I wonder what the proportion of men who went to war and came back alive was.

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