After coffee we were taken out into the vineyards for a tour. The vineyards and countryside in Marlborough were absolutely gorgeous. Copious amounts of 'Savvy' vines everywhere, but also Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and Gewurztraminer as well. Were shown everything from young vines to their slightly older ones. The most interesting part of the tour was when we arrived at the hillside vineyard blocks. To me this was quite cool because you cool literally see how the hillside was influencing the vine growth. There were dips in the hillside were you could tell water had flown through and eroded/changed the soil there because the vines leaves were a darker green than the the rest of the block. I have some cool pictures which display this. The other cool thing was at the top of the hillside there were some vines that looked young but were actually just smaller because that particular spot was causing a lot of stress on their growth. The berries on those vines were also much darker and had thicker skins than the others, I was very intrigued by this and was excited to taste wine from this vineyard. Here are some photos from the vineyard tour:
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| In this photo you can see the vines get darker in the dip as mentioned above. |
After the tour of the vineyards, we were given a tour of the winery, a barrel tasting, and a cellar door tasting. The barrel tasting was quite cool because they took us through different blocks of Pinot and then also showed us different barrels within the same block. It was very interesting to taste the differences and see how they could have quite a lot of fun with blending trials. The cellar door tasting was also quite good, and they offered us some very good deals on wine afterwards.
