Appeasing Bacchus in Blenheim

Another area that you’ll be familiar with if you haunt the aisles of the New World Wine at Tesco, you tragic example of middle-class binge drinking, is Marlborough.  The biggest town in the area is Blenheim, which was where we parked ourselves next.



I’m not going to lie to you: we didn’t do a great deal here other than taste wine.  To be fair - there isn’t a lot to do other than taste wine.  There was a museum we went to, but that was largely focused on wine.  So we joined a tour of ten being ferried around a selection of wineries by a local expert from Hop’n’Grape tours.  My pictures get worse as we went along for no reason that comes to mind.

Pictured: a reason

It was pissing down, but this proved no real inconvenience as outside was not where the action was. The first stop was an auspicious start, as our guide had a key to the otherwise deserted cellar door (wineries call their tasting rooms Cellar Doors, btw.  I didn’t know) which was closed up for the holidays.  Once he let us in, he took us through the facilities and up on top of the storage tanks.

 

He then popped open a 45,000 litre vessel of raw (prior to filtering and bottling) Sauvignon Blanc and scooped out a jugfull for our tasting.  It was rather moreish.

 

We tried a few of the wines from here.  Most of them actually.



We moved to the next place and tried these ten. They were OK too.

We stopped for lunch at the next place, as it had a decent restaurant on site, after trying these three:



The food was both necessary at this point and rather excellent.

  

Let's go to the judges for the half-time analysis:



Then we went to another winery, this time named Nautilus - after the cephalopod. Apparently the shell of said beastie forms one of the finest forms of natural logarithmic spirals.  I honestly cannot fathom what this has to do with making booze from grape juice but I’m sure it’s something really deep and nuanced. Chan says they did say, but I think I was reading the back of a bottle or something.

Fuck only knows

Anyhow, we drank these five:

 

The photos are starting to feel my influence. The 2010 Pinot Noir ‘Four Barriques’ that you can’t quite make out on the top-left is actually quite sought after and totally wasted on the likes of me. I only drink Pinot Noir because I’ve seen Sideways.

  

The last place we visited was one of those worthy, organic places.  Chan assures me we drank (lets not pretend we were ‘tasting’ anymore)  at least another three on top of those shown. The ‘Tangle’ one was a bit of a cacophony – Pinot Gris, Riesling and Gewürztraminer. It was chaos in a glass, to be honest.  You can buy it in Waitrose, if you can even read the labels after your lunchtime gin, you glorious disaster.

And that was enough, I think. Fun.  Let’s ask the judges for their final analysis:



Kurzfassung auf Deutsch: Wir haben viele, viele Weine versucht. Ich bin mir nicht sicher, dass Ich Gewürztraminer mag aber ich freue mich, kann ich es aussprechen.