Wine By Bike

Posted by Emily

Yesterday Nicki and I headed from the little town of Picton to the slightly larger town of Blenheim in a very popular winery area. We got picked up in town by one of the owners of Wine By Bike, a little outfit that rents bikes to those adventurous enough to drink wine and then pedal along the roads. Apparently, they have recently been featured in an article in The New York Times. And for the even more adventurous, they are open in the winter. That was us. We decided to get over the cold weather and bike around the area and do a little wine tasting. A good thing about going in the winter is that there is pretty much no one else out. We got bikes easily (I guess they actually have to turn some people away in the summer) and were usually the only people at the wineries.

Actually, wine tasting and riding a bike isn't as bad as it sounds, so no worries about that. Although the wine samples do add up surprisingly quickly, we were nowhere near drunk and we were still driving in a straight line by the end! Plus, there was very little traffic on the roads.

Anyway, we started out at the wineries that were closest to were we got our bikes (that were even equipped with a wine rack on the back to carry purchases) and worked our way out. Another advantage of being the only people around is that you can ask a lot of questions and learn quite a bit. We learned from the very chatty woman at the first winery we visited that the area around Blenheim is known for its white wines because the weather is cooler. Red grapes do better in a warmer climate. There are a few reds around, but I didn't like them so much. Many of them were quite bitter, in my opinion anyway, and smoky flavored.

I don't know about many of you, but I have never been able to taste the flavors that are listed in the descriptions of wine. Like, "Fruity mixed berry flavor with a tobacco and chocolate finish." I always thought that was a bunch of crap but I could actually taste flavors. I was amazed. Many of the white wines had pear, apricot, passion fruit and guava flavors, though not all at once of course. We had a lot of fun just trying the different wines that the different places had to offer.

Although it would have been nice to be able to buy several of the wines that we tasted, it wouldn't have been very economical for us and the bottles also would have been very hard to carry because there was no way we were paying to have them shipped home. We did buy one bottle each though, a dessert wine that was amazing, and I usually hate dessert wine. I think we bought it because it was very unique and the winery itself doesn't even know when they will be making it again. The wine is made from grapes that are partially spoiled by a fungus but I guess they can still make wine from the grapes. Since the fungus dehydrates the grapes, it causes the wine to be sweeter. Mmmm....sounds appetizing, huh? But really, the wine was amazing!

We had time to see several wineries and make it back to the Wine By Bike place just in time to miss the rain. That would not have been a fun bike ride! From Blenheim, we got on another bus headed for Nelson, about 2 hours away. We had to stay there for the night to catch our bus to the little town that we are in right now called Hokitika. It's primarily known because of the nearby jade mines. We only have one night here as well and we are hoping to be able to entertain ourselves until tomorrow afternoon when we get on another bus to Fox Glacier, where we are going to do a full-day glacier hike.