THE OFFICIAL OFFICE
If you have visited our winery you will have been in the tasting room, as like as not sat in the restaurant, probably strolled in the gardens and, perhaps, viewed our fermentation hall and barrel cellar. If you looked north from the lawns in front of the restaurant you will have also had a view of the start of our vineyards, which cascade in several terraces down to a high plateau overlooking the Waipara River.
There is, however, a vital part of Pegasus Bay which you will not have seen. It is probably the busiest spot on our entire premises and, until lately, one of the smallest. There is no secret or mystery about it. Quite simply you won’t have needed to go there. It’s our office.
The office birds" Leah Jones, Vikki Jones and Mariluz Lloves, behind one of the new desks
Our winery complex has been built in stages. When it was started there was no real office and Chris Donaldson did most of the paperwork from her house in Christchurch. Then we built our restaurant and a small room off this became home to Mariluz Lloves, our first “keeper of the office”. The amount of work and personnel gradually increased but the office did not! The small room came to house 3 staff and to act as the Pegasus Bay nerve centre. It is here we received incoming calls for wine orders and the like, records were stored, computing was done and mail sorted. There was also a continual flow of foot traffic from the winery, restaurant, kitchen, vineyard etc. and it became the busiest spot in our place.
This office, however, was always temporary. We have just moved to our official and final office where there is space aplenty. It is light, airy and has a great view. We just have to watch it does not decrease the work output!
SUMMER DINING AT THE BAY
Even if you haven’t broken out the tennis racquet or oiled the cricket bat it won’t have escaped you that summer is here at last. Taking off the winter woollies, being forced to mow the lawn or having to put on the sunglasses will have given you the clue. We at Pegasus Bay are ready to give you a summer fine dining and wine tasting experience. When you arrive you will by greeted by our restaurant manager and shown to your table. You can dine alfresco in the garden, under the shade of the eves or indoors. After you have placed your order and are waiting for your meal to arrive perhaps you would like to explore our woodland gardens and lakes. Alternatively you might like to have a pre-luncheon tasting of our wines in our tasting room overlooking the barrel hall. Should you not have time for lunch, just come for the tasting anyway.
Our menu changes frequently and emphasizes fresh seasonal cuisine, with each dish especially designed to be enhanced by a particular one of our wines. We will be open for lunches, apart from 25/26th December and 1/2nd January. We do look forward to welcoming you but if you intend to dine it is best to reserve on 033146869 ext 1 to be certain of a place.
STOP PRESS RESTAURANT RECOGNITION
It is always nice to receive a bouquet, rather than a brickbat. Just before going to press we were told that the Pegasus Bay restaurant has been chosen by Cuisine magazine as being one of the top 20 restaurants in the country and by Wellington’s Dominion newspaper as being one of New Zealand’s top 6 winery restaurants. Where abouts we are in the pecking order we don’t yet know, but we were very thrilled with the news.
PUTTING PASSION INTO WINE
Even if you are the most staid individual there will have been times in your life when you will have been thrilled by intense excitement and pleasure. If you haven’t, then you are emotionally dead. The things which provoke such wonderful experiences are usually novel and often unexpected. You don’t tend to get the same buzz if you are exposed to the same thing day after day, no matter how good it is. Perhaps that’s why they have honeymoons! Music, art and literature all have the ability to provoke such emotions, not to mention the sensual pleasures of food and wine.
The creation of something capable of evoking such emotion requires more than just skill, it demands flair, inspiration and a natural sense of proportion. It also means taking risks. The difference between success and failure is often a fine line, no more so than with food and wine. Intensity of flavours that excite without overwhelming, lusciousness that does not cloy and racy acidity that does not taste sour, are but a few examples. The secret is to have a sense of proportion that allows you to take things to the edge without going over. Excitement must not be at the expense of harmony. But we don’t all have the same taste, and than goodness for that. You can’t make wines which will excite everybody all of the time and undoubtedly, there will be some people who will hate those of which you are most proud. On other occasions you will fall.
But there is another way. You don’t have to expose yourself to unnecessary risks and you can make wines that are pleasant, easy to drink and reliable; what are sometimes called “commercial” or “life style” wines. They are aimed at consumers who want to know what they are getting for their buck and who don’t want to be challenged by the novel or unexpected. It is what some have called the “coca-colarisation” of wine. This is best suited to large, publicly owned wine companies whose extensive vineyard holdings allow them to blend away specific differences of which smaller producers might be proud or ashamed. They can make rough places plain, so to speak. The differences in soils, microclimate, winemaker personality and, even vintage, can be conveniently suppressed in order to achieve a standard product.
There has been a gradual world wide change in drinking habits. Beer and spirit consumption has decreased and there has been a move to wine drinking. This has lead brewers and distillers, those in the “drinks-business”, to move into wine, usually through large public companies which have taken over vineyards and wineries. It has, and is, changing the face of the wine industry from being a conglomerate of small players to one in which a decreasing number of increasingly large corporations control more and more. This has been aided by a change in the pattern of distribution and sales of wine. Supermarket sales have gradually risen, while specialist wine shops have decreased. The change in culture is similar to that which occurred with the demise of the grocers shop on the corner.
Big companies are run by directors, executives and accountants, most of whom have never set foot in a vineyard and whose main concern is market share and profit. They fit most comfortably into the “commercial” section of the wine market, where they usually have multiple brands of similar wines to make it seem to the consumer that there is a large choice. Some newspapers have aided and abetted this trend by taking on columnists who proudly announce they know nothing about wine and have an avowed aim of reviewing this bottom tier of products to help guide the “average” drinker. Would newspapers get someone who knew nothing about music to review a Beethoven concert?
What will happen long-term? Will the corporations take over and the small wineries and vineyards disappear? I don’t think so, any more than small restaurants will disappear and the eating out business will be taken over by franchised chains with their standard recipes. Hopefully the cheaper bulk products and supermarket access will introduce more people to wine and many will want to go on to explore the full range of excitement that is available. The number of new winemakers licences continues to increase each year and there are now over 460 in New Zealand and over 2000 in Australia. Most of these are held by small players. Viva la difference!
FROM THE PRESCRIPTION PAD
FIGHTING JACK FROST’S FRIGID FINGERS
I am woken by the persistent ringing and fumble for the telephone in the dark. “Hello,” I say sleepily. No response. I repeat it, but there is still silence.“Damn!” I grumble and glance at the clock. It’s 2:02am. After putting on my dressing gown and slippers I pad downstairs to the computer. I rub
my eyes, yawn, stretch and then pull the dressing gown more tightly around me. It feels cold.
Yes, sure enough the telephone rang because the temperature at the vineyard had dropped steeply and there will probably be a frost. I go back upstairs and start to dress. “What’s the temperature at the vineyard?” my wife sleepily asks. “It’s 2 degrees”, I reply, knowing that even in her soporific state she will have worked out it will be freezing by 4am.“Bye”, I say resignedly as I head for the car to drive the 55 Kms to the vineyard. She curls over and goes back to sleep, guiltless because she dealt with the frost warning 2 nights earlier. I know there won’t be any more sleep tonight.
Wind machine to prevent frost at Pegasus Bay
Frost is a risk in all New Zealand grape growing areas south of and including Auckland. It is also a problem in all of the top wine growing areas in Europe. By and large cooler climates produce higher quality wines and they are all liable to be frosted. The further south you go in this country the greater the risk. It does depend on the particulars of each vineyard site and, of course, the weather. We all hate southerly winds because they bring us a blast of the cold Antarctic air. So long as it keeps blowing it is unlikely to freeze, but if it dies out after mid-day there isn’t enough time to warm things up by nightfall so a frost could be on the cards. If the sky is clear heat radiates from the earth up into the atmosphere and the mercury will start to tumble, usually by about a degree an hour. It may seem perverse of us, but we don’t mind a cloudy night after a southerly wind.
In New Zealand frosts will only damage grape vines over the growing season. When they are without leaves in the winter cold does not bother them. The main frost risk is in the spring and autumn. In some years this can extend as late as the end of November or occur as early as the start of April. As leaves appear as early as late August and harvest may not be until some time in May, depending on the viticultural region, there is plenty of opportunity for Jack Frost’s frigid fingers to do their frightening work.
What happens if a vineyard gets hit with frost? A frost freezes the fluid in the cells, killing leaves, small tender shoots and the flowers, which are going to produce the grapes. Even a frost not heavy enough to cause overt damage, will give the plant a set back and slow development. Severe frosts result in loss of potential fruit and possibly the entire crop. Although new buds will develop shoots and leaves later in the spring and summer, they provide little or no fruit. By early autumn grapes contain so much sugar that frost will not freeze them. It can, however, damage the leaves and this will slow or stop ripening, as it is in the leaves that the grape’s sugar is made.
What can you do to prevent a frost? Well, there are 3 main ways you can fight it. One is to generate heat, such as orchardists have traditionally done by lighting frost pots, which burn diesel. A more recent version is a giant gas burner which looks like a jet engine and is towed behind a tractor. A friend who has such a machine tells me it feels like sitting a-stride a rocket and he has the imminent feeling it might explode at any moment. Perhaps not for the faint hearted! Different technology uses electrically heated wire which runs under the vines.
A second method is to spray water over the vines. This freezes and forms icicles. It sounds crazy, doesn’t it? When water freezes, however, it gives off a small amount of heat and this is usually enough to stop the plant going below 0 degrees. The third way to fight frost is to bring air down from above the inversion layer. Frost occurs because the southerly weather has brought a layer of cold air in close to the ground. In New Zealand there is always warmer air higher up. The cold air is called an “inversion layer” because under normal circumstances the higher you go the colder it gets and this is the nverse situation. You can either bring the warmer air to the vineyard level by using a helicopter to push it down or a wind machine to pull it down. A wind machine is a large propeller on a tall tower that looks something like a windmill. While a motor spins the blades the whole head of the machine rotates in a circle around the top of the tower so that the air is spread in all directions in a large circle over the vineyard. Each machine can protect about 10-12 acres. There is another type of fan which works by trying to blow the air out of the coldest spots in the vineyard but these can only cope with a small area.
So what do I do when I arrive at the vineyard in the middle of the night? I patrol the area by moonlight, measuring the temperature. Pockets of air will be colder in some spots than in others. Should one start to approach a critical level I will start the wind machine in that area. Sometimes a breeze will spring up quite naturally and the temperature will rise. Then I will shut the machines down. Finally, the sun pokes it friendly face over the top of the neighbouring hills so I can close things down and go off to bed. I am sure a vineyard gives you more sleepless nights than practicing medicine. Hell, I might as well have been an obstetrician!
Cheers, Ivan Donaldson
