This wine evokes a taste of...grapes

This past weekend, I went on a group wine tour on Waiheke Island, a paradise just a 35 minute ferry ride northeast from Auckland.

Goodbye Auckland.

Hello island life.

Waiheke has 33 wineries/vineyards dotted around its culture of beaches, no traffic lights, intermittent farmland, and a fast-growing property market. It confusingly feels exclusive, yet totally accessible; it's an intermingling of rolling and rocky hills (think northern Italy), sparse though commercial beach front (Oregon coast), and rural simplicity (Michigan or Wisconsin or Iowa or take your pick. Just don't pick Ohio). There's something about Kiwis, people from an island nation, getting really excited about going to another (still smaller) island that is endearing. If nothing else, it enables one to pretend to be a sommelier for a day.

This was my first wine tour. What comes to mind when you think of a wine tour?  

• A single bead of sweat forming on the nape of your neck as you burn to a crisp under a blazing sun
• The parched back of your throat as your try to form the phrase 'dark blackberry aroma and smoked cedar palate'
• The fact that the desiccation in your throat comes not so much from the heat as the lip-smacking dryness of your last Cabernet Franc
• The pinch of your sunglasses as they slide down your sweat- and sunblock-greased nose
• Mental gymnastics to convince yourself that this sixth Syrah had a more peppery aftertaste than the first, second, or third, but that the fourth was still the best (or was it the fifth?)
• The omnidirectional rolling green vineyards that don't so much scream 'fresh and outdoors' but whisper plainly, 'aridity'
• The glare of a morning and midday sun that melts into a desultory hazy glow after 15 tastings

Waiheke had all that and much more.

I could spend time describing the wine in detail, or at least the wineries and their differences in tastes/practices/sizes/locations/etc. But it's unlikely I would do any of it justice. Luckily, I did take pictures (as did Rhiannon, with her superior camera).

I can't help but think how cool it would be to have a vineyard maze, similar to a corn maze but with more drunk.

Three consecutive and fast-paced wine tastings can make you forget your surroundings. The irony is the wine makes the greens more green and the blues more blue. I'll let the scenery do the talking:

Am I too young to plan my retirement here?

Out the shuttle window. Our shuttle driver, an adorable old Kiwi named Graham, was probably between descriptions of multi-million dollar homes when we stopped here.

Actually an island in the southern hemisphere, or just Napa Valley?

After much wine and bumpy rides in undulating landscape, topped off with duck and risotto and gelato, there's only one thing the human body craves, nay, needs - a beach nap. We took a quick stroll down to Oneroa bay:

Turn this into a pastel painting and you have basically every Thomas Kinkade work ever.

Prime location to close eyes, contemplate meaning of life, and develop midday wine tour hangover.

Finally the day came to a close. This meant a pleasant stroll back to the ferry terminal, where even the drabness of public transportation became a late afternoon seaside spectacle:

Tranquil. Tranquilo. Tranquille. Whatever language you want to use, it's still damn peaceful.

Cheers!

It's all relative

I've gotten pretty bad at taking pictures (some would argue I've never been a good photographer), mostly due to indolence. So bear with me, this will be a thoroughly link-embedded post.

If there's anything that travelling (and entering my late-20s, I'm such a sage now) has taught me, it's that relatives are typical, while absolutes are scarce. I would guess this thinking was formed when I took a Modern Physics course some 7 years ago, and then solidified later in Quantum Mechanics. A solid year and a half of physics is spent learning that a set number of equations and their derivatives govern the motion of the universe, and that by simple application one can explain the world and all of space around us. These absolutes led to many important advances in human knowledge and thereby technology, industry, and extensive life-improvement. But (wait, ahh, what?) no, they aren't absolutes; there's a mind-bending caveat:  move fast enough and time and space become relative, dilating and contracting respectively...oof. Not only did this make me scratch my head, it also turned me into a skeptical (and probably annoying) SOB.

Plainly that's a literal and pedantic example of relativism. Position and time can make things relative in other more anecdotal ways as well. For instance, we've just entered December. For me, this time of year has always meant the arrival of winter and snow. Brace yourselves, Winter is Coming, and for a lot of you in the northern hemisphere, it's already arrived. I usually have mixed feelings about the implication of winter's impending arrival - desultorily shuffling in layers of warm clothes from the front door to the bus stop (con), reading by a crackling fireplace in pajama pants that are not only acceptable but necessary (pro), replacing normal dietary foods with anything that is hot and liquid (pro going in, con coming out...), the brief reflective warmth from a morning sun glistening off the layer of fresh fallen snow (pro), losing what little tan the summer sun left on my pale skin due to the mostly overcast and brusque days (con). In brief it's a toss-up between this and this...¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Holiday season 2012. Pajamas and resulting smile for confirmation of the previous paragraph.

Hey look, an adorable picture of a hedgehog in its native habitat (the front yard of my flat). This photo has nothing to do with the theme of this post.

Down here in the southern hemisphere, summer has arrived. I sleep with my windows open every night, wear shorts whenever I can, and don't have to compromise my fashion (ha, yeah right) for layers of strictly functional body-warming clothes. And in New Zealand, the summer sun is special - that is, dangerous. Here we have a lovely (human-induced) ozone layer hole of sunshine. Seriously, read that NASA article, "The ozone is so thin in this part of the world that the weather report on the nightly news includes five-minute sunburn alerts." If my math is correct, that translates to a 30 second sunburn for my freckled redheaded friends. I can only imagine the horror.

[All this potential for quick and painful sunburns leads me to this sidebar PSA: wear sunblock.  Yes it can be greasy/oily on application and can make your skin sticky (annoyingly attractive to bits of sand), and sometimes the smell isn't even that great. But what's a bit of discomfort now relative (see what I did there?) to shaving skin and time from your life?]

So everything is relative - even the things as absolute as my fettered understanding of when and what seasons are, or the (seeming) immutability of the sun.

Cheers!

Bonus. A few other relatives:

• Time zones:  I find these super fascinating. They were originally introduced in the mid 1880s as a way to standardize shipping and industrial trade, but now are often political and confusing. Look at this map. China spans 5 geographic time zones, but chooses to put everyone (1.4 billion people!) on the same time. Some regions/cities even have half or quarter time zones. Weird.
• Thanksgiving:  Though not actually a holiday here, with enough obdurate Americans and their desire to eat and drink to excess, anything is possible. I had both a Thanksgiving dinner with Rhiannon and flatmates and a Sunday Thanksgiving picnic hosted by my American coworker, Renee. Some things were different - instead of turkey, lamb and BBQ chicken and sausages were served, and instead of backyard football, it was touch rugby.

Throwing a ball backward to move forward is confusing. Also if the goal is to not get touched, I have failed miserably (lower right). I also want to point out how insanely smiley everyone is here.

But the important things remained the same - thanks was still given, though in a big circle of mostly strangers and ambiguous thanks,

Speech!

and my desserts were traditional and highly butter-infused.

Sweet potato (here called kumara) bake and homemade molasses pumpkin pie, both with brown sugar - pecan topping. Nom nom.