Lunch at Wither Hills Winery and visit to Aviation Heritage Museum.
David gets up and is running south by 7 a.m., toward two mountaintops about a mile away. He runs on [name to come], a typical residential street in Blenheim: a few people emerge from houses and get in cars to commute to work; he can smell baking dough as he passes a few houses on the cement sidewalk. Two pairs of small hands in the cement remind him of the four small hands in the cement sidewalk on Yuma Street … a tiny reminder that people the world around are the same and yet so different. He runs ‘till he’s out of gas at Wither Road — we may go to the vineyard later — and walks up a few streets into the foothills of the two mountains, the trail to which goes through a working farm. As he studies the trail maps, a farmer in a tiny caged truck with four dogs putters behind a herd of about 75 sheep. The dogs jump out and without a sound herd the sheep across the pasture, up a road and onto the mountainside.
Running back to town, heading north, David can see a range of mountains almost as far west and east as he can see. To the west, they are clear, their peaks sharp against blue sky, but to the east, clouds cover the peaks like a long wavy purple pompadour. He guesses this range holds the weather from Marlborough region’s wide, flat valley, giving the area its climate perfect for growing the Sauvignon Blanc and Gris that so predominate.
Tea for John and Cynthia, French-pressed coffee for Roberta and David. Cynthia prepares to go to Vodophone to get her new iPhone 8 into working order for the rest of our trip or until David decides to test its impermeability to the salt water in Oz.
Time interminably passes in Vodophone with so little success in restoring Cynthia’s new phone that we bag the process and head for the Wither Hills vineyard, which, like 80 percent of the notably sized wineries in Marlborough, are within 15 minutes drive of Blenheim out Old Renwick Rd. The vineyards in Marlborough stretch as far in every direction as you can see, stopping only at the feet of the mountains that surround the flat-as-a-tidal-plain valley. David has never seen so many vines in one geographic area anywhere, row after row, vineyard after vineyard, unbroken rows in checkerboard pattern.
This observation proves even more true when John, Roberta, Cynthia and David climb four flights up to the top of the tower in the center of the Wither Hills vineyard for a purview of the region. And descend to get a corner table under an arbor of wisteria where they order flights of wine that turn out to be the best we all agree we’ve had in New Zealand (David demurs on the reds … best red’s been in Hawke’s Bay). The food at Allan Scott was a bit nicer and the lawn at Cloudy Bay was was more graceful, but the wines of Wither seem uniformly less acidic, rounder, a bit more finished. Wither also has a plot of lawn out front with about 25 short rows of grapes, each row a different variety, well labeled. You walk among these vines, plucking a grape from each and get the immediate connection between the taste of the raw grape and the finished wine that it becomes. It’s been one of the hottest growing seasons ever in Marlborough this year, so the grapes are ripe … bursting … now and are being harvested two weeks earlier than usual. So each one we pluck is just right.
Sir Peter Jackson of Lord of the Rings’ movies fame, funded the Knights of the Sky Exhibition at the Omaka Aviation Heritage Centre, just down the road from Wither Hills, installing his own collection of World War I aircraft, replicas, and artifacts. We get a free guided tour from a retired Brit civil engineer named Roger, who has a very dry sense of humor. The first plane, a Caproni CA22 — “Its rotary engine had 65 horse power and the craft was a stable flier but it didn’t last long. Lads didn’t take to it. The engine weighed so much the plane would somersault if the pilot leaned forward during take off.” Second plane: the French Etrich Taube, THE plane most in the shape of a bird ever built.
Artifacts? A few insignificant ones: Eddie Rickenbacker’s long leather flight coat, “the Red Baron” von Richtoften silver commemorative kill cups, which he commissioned (small for the first nine, big for number 10 with the pattern continued until he got to his final 80, the most of any ace … well, basically … ever) — Roger, “The Germans loved bling.” — and even footage of the Baron’s burial in France where he was shot through the heart during an Ariel dogfight in his trademark triplane — Roger: “A tad slow, but turns on a dime. He loved to get in the first shot.” — by an Australian gun crew and lived long enough to crash land.
Back to the Sutherland’s Blenheim bungalow for G&Ts, wines, cheeses, smoked salmon, salads, salamis for dinner and relatively early to bed.
Another horrible, terrible, no-good, really bad day.
Two Tramps 