Despite ghastly weather in Napier in the days before the tour started, the sun shone brightly for the first full day of Tour 3. The weather has been unbelievably good on all three tours – so far….
There have been many sceptics about visiting a commercial bottling facility, but without a doubt our visits to Wineworks have been a phenomenal success.
Lachie Thomas, who has taken us round, has given us a comprehensive tour and deep insight into this important service – a less romantic, but vital, aspect of the wine business.
Amazingly, given that we are in Hawkes Bay, the majority of their business is from Marlborough with tankers being despatched to collect the wine and return for bottling. They bottle any amount from 100 litres to 100,000 cases!
From Wineworks we headed off to the De La Terre winery. This is a charming farm that has been almost hand built by Tony and Kaye Prichard.
Kaye runs the cellar door and Tony is the winemaker. Tony is a very highly regarded winemaker, having learnt his craft at the renowned Church Road winery. He is also a serial experimenter and clearly loves dabbling with different blends and ideas in the winery.
It was straight down to the nitty gritty of tasting. This is something that has been a refreshing change on all the tours – very little time spent looking at stainless steel tanks!
We tasted a fascinating selection of chardonnays ranging from the elegant and well balanced Reserve 2013 through to a yeast dominated 2009 wine which had spent (according to Tony) a bit too long on its lees, followed by a really minerally, unoaked Chablis-esq style and finishing up with a barrel sample of the Reserve 2014.
A delicious lunch sourced from the local farmers market was taken in their café and then we were back for the reds. They recently acquired a vineyard on the famous Te Mata peak which is planted with a range of different rape varieties.
We weren’t expecting to taste Barbera, Montepulciano and Tannat! These were the first vintages of these grapes from the recently acquired vineyard so you sense he is still finding his way.
De la Terre has been a wonderful place to visit. Amazing people, beautiful location and even a 12 week old puppy to welcome us!
On our final visit of the day we met a Portuguese importer of cork – a business that was set up to try and improve the appalling cork quality that was rampant in the late 90’s.
Over 2000 corks a day are inspected by hand by 1 person to ensure and grade quality and despite the Kiwi move to screwcap is doing good business for those wineries that still need cork.