Dear Auntie Jean and Uncle Alan

Thank you for your very generous wedding gift. We decided to spend it on a wine tasting tour here on Waiheke Island, a quiet hilly place close to Auckland in terms of geography but far away in terms of setting. Waiheke is blessed with some of the hottest, sunniest climates in the whole of New Zealand, which makes the windy, cold, rainy weather we had during the tour somewhat of an irony. However, when the weather is rubbish outside, there is no better activity than being driven around in a nice warm bus to various vineyards and fed some rather tasty wine.

It wasn't just about the drinking though. At each stop we got to learn lots of interesting facts about wine growing - like 2013 was the best year for wine here because it was a particularly hot, dry season. When there is a lack of water around, the grapes process the sugar more and so the wine is extra sweet and full bodied. You have to treat your grapes mean to get the best out of them. We learnt lots of other stuff but I can't remember any of it. Waiheke is particularly good for red wines and as Donna isn't a fan of reds, I ended up polising off two glasses of each one we tried.

These double portions of red wine are possibly the reason why I agreed with Donna that it was perfectly acceptable to spend $13 on a tub of jam because it was made of special honey or something. Again, I wasn't really listening because I was double fisting two rather nice Syrahs at the time and trying to distinguish which I preferred. On a more sensible note, we also treated ourselves to a rather nice bottle of Pinot Gris and a Rose to take away with us, but more on that later.

The tour was great because it took us to three very different vineyards. The first offered a tutored degustation tasting session. This involved: try this wine, doesn't it taste horrible? Now eat a bit of chocolate and try the wine again, notice how it tastes a lot better? It was very interesting but possibly not a good selling point unless you didn't mind eating chocolate every time you wanted a glass of wine. The second vineyard had the best wines (which also happened to be the cheapest) as well as a really informative host, while the third one specialised in vodkas and gins.

Once again we were blessed with a brilliant tour guide who included rather a lot of information about the island, for example, about the new supermarket they are building and how the locals still prefer the old one. Why can I remember that but nothing about the wines?

The only drawback to the tour was that our guide kept rushing us away from each vineyard to the next one just as we were getting into the swing of it. This was to try and help the people who were getting the ferry back to Auckland catch the last one. When it was clear, despite his hurrying efforts, we weren't going to make it, he happily dropped us all off at a rather nice pub so we could carry on the session.

A tour is just a tour without a good group of people to share it with and a mark of a good group of people is when everyone heads to the pub together afterwards to carry on far into the night, until we got chucked out either because the bar was closing or because we were too drunk. Donna claimed that she was refused a last jaegermeister because I was intoxicated. I am not sure how that works.

I think at that point we were moving onto another bar… we were walking up a steep hill so I was piggybacking Donna again… there was no room in the backpack for the wine so Donna was trying to carry the bag with the wine we'd bought in it… we are not sure what happened next but all of a sudden the bag was on the floor and the bottles were smashed all over the road. It was a sad end to a very good day when the only thing that survived was the tub of jam. However, this just meant that we had an excuse to get up the next day and go to another vineyard to buy some more so all's well that ends well.

To make up for not being able to take Sunny on the tour with us, we bought him a rather fetching pair of orange furry dice. These, along with the heavy rain which has cleaned away all the dirt on him has made him look like a new car again. However, he has started making a rather worrying squeaking noise.

All our love

Jim and Donna

INTERESTING KIWI FACT OF THE DAY

Some New Zealanders living in remote areas of New Zealand are so far away from the nearest supermarket that they have had to adapt to going days and often weeks without food. To help with this, they have evolved big cheeks like hamsters so they can store large quantities of food in them. This reduces their need to eat to only once or twice a month. To combat the food in their cheeks going off, they often keep ice packs in there to help keep the food cool.