Well oiled

The NZ Herald ran my piece about the Martinborough Olive Harvest Festival we attended back in July when we were looked after so well by the kind folk at Destination Wairarapa.  

Loving the pix from the Animator (and yes, that is me, down the far end of the table on the left, talking up a storm).

Click here to read.

The weekend

There was wine, food, newly pressed olive oil and a sky so blue it should be X rated.

There were walks through olive groves and tastings with the passionate growers/artisans, as well as a night market where we ran into friends but my feet froze from the cold and we had to forgo dinner with them in order to return to the toasty warm Aylstone Boutique Retreat that the fabulous Destination Wairarapa PRs had put us in (think the Hamptons but with fewer people).

The weekend started with this long lunch at Coney vineyard  where 28 of us scoffed a four course degustation menu matched with Lot Eight olive oils under a blazing sun and agreed that life should always be this good.

A blissful weekend and now I have to condense it into two 600 word stories (one for the NZ market and one for the Australian). Well there's no such thing as a free lunch, right?

  

Hot

An epic weekend of wine and food and olive oil and chocolate. We returned from the Wairarapa with punnets of the freshest strawberries ("Picked this morning," said the teenage girl who was selling them from the side of the road, the biggest umbrella I've ever seen shielding  her from the vicious midday sun).

Yes peeps, it was HOT! Like 29 degrees today. And pretty much the same yesterday. This is what happens when you spend your weekend interviewing clever winemakers, chefs, bar owners, chocolatiers and olive oil producers, when you drink in their passion and enthusiasm and absolute love of what they do as eagerly as you swallow litres of water, and wine, in an attempt to rehydrate. And forget to put on sunscreen first.

       
To the good folk at Destination Wairarapa who hosted us, a thousand thank yous. It was a beautiful weekend and we enjoyed every minute. So much so, we started playing the 'we should get a weekend place here' game. This can only end in good things.

The Animator, of course, took hundreds of fantabulous images which he is now sorting for the magazine. They, however, will have to wait for another time as  my eyes are closing and it's time for bed.