Hawkes Bay Winery Tour

The Mission Estate

Woke to grey skies and rain so took the opportunity to catch up on laundry and writing the blog. Picked up at noon by Grape Escape, the winery tour company. Just six other people, in addition to ourselves and Dave, the guide, so a nice small group. First stop was the Mission Estate. This is one of New Zealand's largest and oldest wineries, founded by missionaries in 1850 ­to make sacramental wine. Originally on the coast, the missionaries got fed up of being flooded, so dismantled their mission building into several chunks, towed them to higher ground, and rebuilt the mission there. It's a nice, old characterful wooden building, set in fine grounds. Here we had our first samples, tasting 1 sparkling, 3 white and 3 red wines from their range. Bought a bottle each of the sparkling wine and the Semillon dessert wine.

Then it was on to the Elephant Hill Estate and Winery. In contrast to the Mission, this is a very modern looking estate - all glass and stainless steel - on the Te Awanga coast. Established by a German businessman, who fell in love wirth the area in 2001. Had an excellent lunch here in their stylish restaurant as well as tasting a selection of 6 of their good wines. Bought a bottle of Sauvingnon Blanc and Syrah.

Elephant Hill wine tasting

Third visit was to Black Barn Vineyards. This is a smaller estate, in the hillsides south of Havelock North. Unlike the Mission and Elephant Hill, they don't export their wine, but concentrate on the home market. Tasted another six wines here and bought a bottle of Pinot Gris.

The fourth and final visit was to Askerne Vineyards, in the same area as Black Barn. Askerne is a single estate winery, committed to producing elegant fine wines. Here the host was as much of a star turn as the wines. He talked us through 13 different wines, describing their nature, comparing them with same grape wines made in other countries, and providing lots of details on taste and appropriate foods to accompany the wines.

Wine tasting at the Black Barn

Our host and sample bottles at the Askerne winery

All this was peppered with jokes and anecdotes, making this the most amusing and enjoyable of our four visits. Bought a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Noir.

All told we sampled over 30 wines and chose what we thought were the best in each estate. We seemed to be remarkably sober at the end of it but we'll see if it catches up with us in the evening.  We'd cooked enough food on Saturday to have an evening in, so no driving at all today.