KEEP THE PLAYGROUND CLEAN

The head of a successful Sicilian winery was breathing his last and his 3 sons were clustered around his bed. "Come closer, he whispered. "I have an important secret I want to share. You can also make it out of grapes!"

Life isn't really like that. The old adage that "you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear" definitely applies to vino. While it is easy enough to ruin good grapes in the winery you can't produce a top quality drop out of garbage. That's why we work our butts off in the vineyard to ensure that we have the best possible grapes. Achieving this means that the winemakers can relax and let the wines look after themselves, guiding rather than directing them. It's a little bit like a school teacher guiding the kids. The good ones are self-motivated and really achieve great things, while bad ones require a huge amount of effort and end up mediocre.

For the size of our vineyard we employ a high number of staff as we do a lot of specialised hand work, training and grooming our vines, rather than just depending on machines. In keeping with this we desire to be as natural and simple as possible, using viticultural practices which are environmentally friendly, promote health and are sustainable in the long term. That is why we were early members of the New Zealand Sustainable Wine Growing Programme, which is devoted to monitoring and approving vineyard activities to make certain they are best practice and environmentally safe. We make minimal use of sprays and while we apply simple compounds such as sulphur, we have never used pesticides. We encourage wild flowers to help build up the population of beneficial carnivorous insects, which prey on others that happily munch grape plants. In doing this, however, we have chosen to work with nature and not introduced exotic plants, simply utilising those that were already there. This plant cover also promotes the development of beneficial soil organisms to help sustain the vine. The philosophy is simple. Looking after the vines' playground will help produce the best kids: healthy vines make healthy wines.

SPEND SOME TIME IN THE GARDEN

Who doesn't enjoy being outdoors on a nice summer's day? The experience is even better if you are in pleasant surroundings. Two trusty gardeners, Anne Gibbs and Linda Tayles, along with Chris Donaldson, have spent a lot of time developing and grooming the extensive gardens and ponds around our winery and restaurant. We will be open for lunches throughout the season and beyond so come and enjoy our new summer menu of serious seasonal cuisine in the garden. Should the weather unexpectedly cool down you can munch your lunch and savour a sip while enjoying the gardens from the warmth of the Pegasus Restaurant. We look forward to seeing you.

THE SHAPE OF THINGS

Next time you crack the top off your favourite tipple, spare the time to have a decent look at the bottle. Chances are you won't notice anything unusual, but this "ordinary" bottle is relatively recent and didn't just suddenly appear. It evolved. No doubt you have heard about the great cork versus screw cap debate, which is all the rage in the wine industry at the moment. Well, the question of how to protect wine from the ravages of oxygen, which rapidly makes it go off, is nothing new. The ancient Greeks and Romans used to keep their wine safe in clay pots or amphorae by putting a layer of olive oil on the surface, which prevents the oxygen from penetrating.

Greased cloth around wooden bungs was utilised to help seal barrels in the Middle Ages. No-one had bottled wine in those times and once a barrel was broached it had to be consumed quickly to stop it deteriorating. It must have been a tough life! The wine was served in jugs or stored in narrow-necked carafes, which could be partially sealed by pieces of stick wound with cloth. As the carafes were not watertight they had to be left standing up.

Back in the late 17th century some bright spark discovered cork. The bark of the cork oak tree is unique. Not only is it very thick but it is also spongy so it can be compressed, but yet wants to re-expand, thus forming a good seal. The first bottles with cork stoppers were squat, wide bottomed ones, like the carafes, almost as broad as they were tall. It took some time to realise that the cork had a greater tendency to expand, and hence formed a tighter seal, if it was moist. This meant bottles had to be lying on their sides and over a century bottle shapes gradually changed, becoming longer and narrower. The volumes, however, remained about the same at 750mls. Why? Not because any EU bureaucrat ordained it to be so, but because this is about the volume a glass blower can comfortably exhale in a single breath. Remember, all bottles were hand-blown.

Should you, having consumed one bottle, feel the need for a second, you may notice something curious, assuming of course, that you are still in an observant frame of mind. Modern wine bottles are not all the same shape, even when they come from a single country, such as France. Different wine producing areas have developed their own distinctive bottle shapes. The reason for some of these is obscure, but the EU bureaucrats have now decided that wines from these areas must be bottled in these traditional shapes if they are to carry the appropriate regional designation.

When a bottle is hand blown, the shoulders, or the part where the neck joins the body, naturally tend to be fairly long and gently sloping. This can still be seen in the traditional bottle shapes of most areas, although those from regions such as Burgundy and the Rhone Valley tend to be shorter than those from Alsace. The bottles of Bordeaux, however, have a much shorter neck and a sharper angled shoulder with a correspondingly longer body length. This is possibly to help catch the sediment in the shoulder when decanting the heavier bodied Clarets, which tend to throw more of a deposit.

Then there are the colours. Red wine rapidly becomes brown and loses its colour intensity if exposed to light. Hence the dark green bottles. White wines are not affected, so they sometimes end up in clear bottles.

At Pegasus Bay we are using classical French grapes so we bottle our wines in traditional bottle shapes. Don't be fooled, we are not trying to copy French wines, but to make something distinctively Kiwi. We do, however, respect tradition.

FROM THE PRESCRIPTION PAD

Have you noticed how these days the media tends to emphasise bad news? It is as though good news is boring and people are only interested in disasters. This disease has even spread to the bureaucrats, who insist that dire warnings be printed on a range of consumer products. The illness is perhaps most advanced in the US, where the surgeon general, whoever he is, gives you a warning on every bottle of wine you buy. Having spent many years as a medical practitioner, I have never met a surgeon who could tell me anything about the effects of alcohol, beyond a generally held notion that it is good for sterilisation. Not surprising, given that the study of the effects of such substances is the province of physicians, rather than surgeons. Anyhow, this venerable old surgeon, who heads the US bureaucracy, warns you that the consumption of alcoholic beverages impairs your ability to drive a car or operate machinery and may cause health problems. Hardly rocket science you may say. He also advises that women should not drink alcoholic beverages during pregnancy. That's it — not a word about the scientifically documented health benefits of moderate wine intake.

Well, medical science has now come up with evidence of other positive effects of wine that this generalissimo of a surgeon will be in 2 minds as to whether to include in his list of warnings. It is that women who drink wine become pregnant more rapidly than those who don't. I can see him rubbing his hands at the thought of another warning saying, "Consumption of this product may cause you to become pregnant." Now, I suspect that you, like him, may jump to the conclusion that this tendency for female wine drinkers to become pregnant has something to do with what sociologists might term the promotion of social interaction and psychologists call, lessening of inhibition. In other words, careless conceptions. If so, I think you need to go to a mind cleaning course.

No, these pregnancies were all planned and achieved between couples trying to have a child. The study reported in Human Reproduction (2003;18:1967-71) details the experience of 30,000 women in Denmark. It found that those who drank moderate amounts of alcohol, which they defined as being between a half and 7 glasses of wine a week, were able to achieve pregnancy more rapidly than non-drinkers. In addition, those who enjoyed a glass of wine got there faster than those who drank beer or spirits. In fact, 50% of the women became pregnant within the first 2 months of trying and only 15% waited longer than 12 months.

Just how wine might have this beneficial effect is something of a conundrum. There are plenty of other studies to suggest that moderate wine drinkers have a lower risk of lung cancer, cancer of the digestive tract, stroke and overall mortality, than non-drinkers and moderate drinkers of beer and spirits. Many of these findings have been put down to the presence of powerful anti-oxidants in wine preventing damage to the body's cells. How wine relates to fecundity, i.e., the ability of a sexually active couple to achieve pregnancy, is sheer speculation. Previous studies have shown that those who drink wine are more intelligent and of higher socio-economic background than others, so that perhaps they are just a group with better reproductive potential. The other possibility is that wine actually promotes the business of having kids and, if so, it will presumably work with unplanned, as well as planned, pregnancies.

All this must be causing a dreadful headache for the poor old general surgeon as he is no doubt at this minute pondering whether to advise us or not. Might I suggest he comes straight to the point and warn, "This wine should be drunk only by women with intent..."

Cheers, Ivan Donaldson