If you’ve ever been to Galicia, you may have been perplexed by the presence of tartan, Celtic jewelry, and buskers playing bagpipes. Wait a minute, you thought. I thought I was in Spain? Then the rainy landscape, green ferns, and white beaches made you think that maybe you hadn’t left home at all and were still in New Zealand. Until you ate some of the best and most unusual seafood of your life at lunch, looking out past the stone ruins on the headland to sea, a bottle of exquisite Albariño from nearby Rías Baixas on the table, and concluded...

When you visit a region such as Marlborough, it’s hard not to be slightly fearful of the swathe of monoculture cutting its way into the countryside that wine now represents. Grape growing may not be as harmful as intensive livestock farming, but as an industry in expansion, its role is becoming more and more relevant. Organic wine has therefore become an increasingly important commodity in relation to how this country looks forward at protecting its environment and promoting its eco and biodiversity. Currently, there are no government incentives (subsidies or tax breaks) to becoming certified organic, so the onus sits...

What’s so special about organic wine? Does organic wine actually taste better than non organic wine or is it perceived as a better product because it gives us all milder hangovers or that all important feel good factor of buying a consumable product labelled organic? New Zealand’s third Organic Wine Week is about to take place from Monday 21 to Sunday 27 September, so it’s worth diving in to ask a few questions about why organic wine production is growing in this country and globally. This blog is intended to provide a  bit of a gateway to information about organic...

Mountford Winery sits stylishly on the limestone slopes of North Canterbury's Waipara Valley where its new owner, Takahiro Koyama, is carrying on the great work that his well known predecessor did. The winery has changed hands twice in its life and for most of its history, the wines have been made by CP Lin; not only an outstanding winemaker but a blind one, whose taste buds and palate are legendary for good reason. Fellow winemaker Theo Coles then made Mountford Wines for a couple of years in 2014, 2015 and 2016. There was no 2017 vintage produced and Takahiro took over from 2018...

25 Years of whisky at Regional Wines - Daniel Bruce McLaren's 25th Anniversary tastings at Regional Wines With the exception of the Regional Wines tasting room, a lot has changed over the last 25 years. Back then you could purchase a house in Wellington for peanuts. Likewise, you could put on whisky tastings that included the Springbank 1966 Local Barley, Springbank 35yo and 25yo without batting an eyelid (see image below). That tasting would now cost somewhere in the region of $600 per person. Of course, 25 years has made some of these whiskies much more collectible, but regardless, it...