MARTINBOROUGH’S PINOT PLEASURES
The road to New Zealand’s Wairarapa wine region is not for the faint of heart. The sole strip of pavement that connects the capital city of Wellington, at the bottom of the North Island, to the three subregions that make up Wairarapa—Martinborough, Gladstone and Masterton—is simultaneously breathtaking and nauseating.
It hurtles around hairpin bends carved into the sides of cliffs that served as a backdrop for The Lord of the Rings movie. It then descends into a windswept valley carved from the Ruamahanga River.
Once you’ve arrived, however, any queasiness is quickly replaced by the warm, fuzzy feeling only the most charming of places can evoke. Centered around the quaint, colonial town of Martinborough, the wineries of Wairarapa are the kind you can bike to in a flash, to taste for little or no fee at modest cellar doors and banter with the winemaker.
Just don’t let such modesty fool you. In crafting some of the country’s most complex, singular and long-lived wines from the notoriously fussy Pinot Noir grape, Wairarapa’s motley crew of winemakers has helped
