Wellington and on to the south island

This is a tui, a fairly common but interesting bird...very noisy
The vines at Kaituna Estate, part of Montana winery where we are now casual laborers

We heard it through the grapevine that working on vineyards was worthwhile, so after travelling around the north island for a bit and stopping in Wellington for a few days to visit Gretchen and Matt, we drove onto the ferry and headed to the south island on Saturday to make our way to sunny Blenheim where wineries are popping up faster than asparagus. Gretchen and Matt, by the way, have been living in Wellington since February and after working for five or six months they are now chillin' and doing all the best hikes and backpacking trips in NZ. Lucky dogs! But lucky us because we will be spending xmas with them at Nelson Lakes here on the south island.

They took us to a great wildlife santuary right in Wellington where we spotted many NZ-only birds, insects, and a cool lizard called a tuatara. Not having any mammals before humans arrived, NZ was really a land of birds and there are many interesting and uncommon species. The moas, which were huge flightless birds like ostriches, were hunted to extinction by Maoris hundreds of years ago. Kiwis are still here but they and many other birds are threatened by the introduction of possums, rats, etc. So there are many small sanctuaries (often on islands) where pests are fenced out and native animals are allowed to do their thing without having to deal with things that they evolved without. Check out Julie's photo site for some shots of a few of the things we saw.

So far we like it in Blenheim and it has been very hot and dry, real wine growing climate I guess. We started working on the vines on Monday, doing a job they call wire lifting. Basically we walk the rows and hook the wires that have been left hanging down during the winter, compressing and tightening the vines to support them as the grapes grow and begin to weigh them down. The grapes are teeny right now and won't be harvested until April or so, when we will be long gone, perhaps sitting on a beach in Lombok after diving in crystal clear blue tropical seas teeming with...ok I digress, we need to make some dough so that will have to wait. Now, wire tightening may sound lousy and boring, but the good news is that we just missed bud rubbing season, which involves bending over a thousand times a day...been there and done that! Even better, we are actually making a decent amount of moola for our efforts.

We've also been doing some wine tasting, which is generally FREE so it might become a regular after-work activity. There are something like 150 wineries in the area, so we have our work cut out for us. The area is best known for white wines like Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Gris, Chardonnay, Reisling, Gwertztraminer (sp?), but there is some Pinot Noir and it is halway decent but not nearly as common. So being mostly red wine drinkers I think this will broaden our horizons. We miss beer, but we did get a nice beer fix in Wellington at Mac's Brewery (pics in Jay's photo album), which seems to be one of the few breweries in NZ that knows what hops are and aren't TOO afraid to use them. Beer is also much more expensive here than in the states which further dampens our interest. But for now we are psyched to enjoy and learn about wine. We will report back at some point with our tasting notes, by which time we maybe will have learned how to detect in wine such things as a "hint of horsehair" or a "linear structure", but I doubt it.