Walking in a vintner wonderland

So this was our first Christmas in the summer. It was a bit unsettling as there were people outside by choice.

 
We stayed in Napier, which is a town known for its Art Deco buildings.   Actually it was known as a seaside town of no real note, until it suffered a devastating earthquake in 1931, which erased much of the town as it was.   The subsequent rebuild in the contemporary fashion remade the town into a capital of Art Deco architecture in New Zealand.

We, like many, were staying in a hotel on the town’s beachfront.  Like many of our accommodation choices in NZ, it was a motel-type suite with a kitchen and cooking facilities.  Mind you, just because we have them, doesn’t mean we use them - Christmas Eve was marked by us getting fish and chips from the local chippy. It was an acceptable facsimile of the greasy motherland staple.

There are communal barbecue facilities in a lot of public parks and picnic areas here.  They’re these electric, stainless steel flat top devices rather than the grill-and-solid-fuel contraptions that we’re all familiar with, but it was outside and hot and so would suffice.  Thus provided for, and as a matter of principle because it was a viable option for the first time in my life, we cooked our Christmas dinner on the barbecue across the way from the hotel, overlooking the beach.

It felt weird just how busy it was outside.  In the UK, Christmas day falls just the other side of the shortest day in the year; here it is the opposite.  So while in Blighty you’ll maybe see a few kids braving the cold on their new bikes, micro scooters or latest Chinese perambulatory contraption prior to it exploding in a shower of cheap plastic and burned copper wire, here people are outside with their family because it is nice.  It’s all wrong – you’re supposed to be inside watching terrible television, overindulging on chocolate and booze and falling out with each other three-quarters of the way into a game of Monopoly when people start going bankrupt.  It says so in the scriptures.

What 04:30 in the morning looks like.  Bah humbug.

But it was differently pleasant.  We had a variety of meat, ate a figurative amount of salad, and I had my Christmas pudding back in the room.  They were running a Marvel film marathon on the film channel, so that part was catered for, too.   We had to get up at 04:30 on Boxing day, however, to Skype my relatives after their dinner the previous day. The temporal maths are a pain sometimes.

Boxing Day we spent (after a few hours more sleep) doing a little shopping and with some wine tasting in the New Zealand Wine Centre.  We couldn’t get out to the local wineries in Hawkes Bay as they were shut for the holiday, so this would have to do until we got to Marlborough.  They had a very useful ‘Aroma room’, which had examples of all of the individual fragrances to be expected when drinking the different varieties of wine, which was actually quite helpful.  Personally, I was unaware of what hawthorn smelled like before, so now I can pretend that I’m getting some of that in the nose, but with  lemongrass and lavender on the palette, but also with some secondary notes of leathery drawing room and hints of social discord.

The tasting was done in the auditorium, watching a film with representatives of the various winemakers talking us through each glass.  My objectivity was tested somewhat, as I started  marking them for charisma, pretentiousness and camera lighting.

I'm getting random noun and a hint of adjective 

We also had a chat with the proprietor and had a round of dessert wines and sweets, while she was closing up for the day. We did learn that the land of several of the vineyards from whom we had tasted wines were actually underwater prior to the earthquake, which gives you some impression of the scale of the quake such that the ground was raised 4-5 meters.  And they promptly turned the miraculous creation-from-destruction into alcohol.  Brings a lump to the throat, it does.

The weather held up, which we assumed was a given but this was apparently not an entirely safe bet.  I’m writing this on the 3rd and it’s lashing down outside and reports are that the north island is pretty swamped, with several campsites abandoned and holidays called off.   There are some traditions from the motherland they could've left behind.

Anyway, belated season's greetings to you all.

Kurzfassung auf Deutsch: Wir hatten Weihnachten im Sommer, die sonderbar war. Weihnachtsessen war auf einem Grill gekocht und wir dann sahen fern wie zu Hause. Es hat eine Weinprobe am zweiten Weihnachtstag (26. Dezember).Eine angenehme Erfahrung. 

Wir wünschen allen Lesern frohe Weihnachten und ein gutes Neues Jahr.