Spare Time For Fine Wine

“I imagined this is how it was in Napa in the thirties – an intimate winemaking community that the world hadn’t yet discovered,” writes Chang-Rae Lee as he tours through Central Otago. Lee takes his circuitous route across the country as an opportunity to get a taste of the land. “You can learn something about a place from its serendipitous matrix of geography and climate and soils, the particular expressions of viticulture being as telling of locale as any fields of wild resident flora. Wine people refer to this as gout de terroir, the idea that you can taste something of a patch of land in the glass …” The results seem to satisfy, and in an area where the “very landscape promotes patience, encouraging you to open your eyes and let it all be, ” “the truest savor of the land can become a part of you as well.”