Making Salsa Verde

One of the tastings we held at Astrolabe Farm was for our Chinese distributors, Jonty and William from New Zealand Wine International Ltd and two of their Chinese contacts. A tasting of our Astrolabe Wines was held before a fantastic lunch prepared by Jane, Jason, Simon and myself. My contribution being a salad and salsa verde. I couldn’t find the recipe for the salsa verde so ended up having to search on our website for it- this blog has been very useful for this. Incidentally we get a lot of visitors to our site because of this recipe!

Vintage is also happening! It has been an earlier start to vintage this year, with the first of our Pinot Gris being taken on the 18th March. Since then we have taken some more Pinot Gris,

Jane Picking Pinot Noir at Astrolabe farm

Pinot Noir and Gewurztraminer, making our first Sauvignon Blanc pick this evening. Being an earlier start, it has also been a slower start, with Simon being able to pick exactly when the fruit has the desired ripeness and flavour profiles.

The weather has been perfect, and as I type this I am looking out to a clear blue sky with no clouds in sight. The mornings are getting cooler though- precisely one of the reasons Marlborough is such a unique growing region. The fine days (surprisingly, tomorrow is supposed to get to 27°C!) are great for ripening, and the cool nights are perfect for picking in, allowing us to keep the phenolics down, protecting the wines aromatic potential. Vintage will ramp-up this week, though, as the 12 hour shifts in the wineries come into play, and the bulk of the fruit will be picked in the next 10 days or so, I believe. It is a fantastic time of year that I personally love – the town has a buzz to it, harvesters, gondolas and grape trucks are a common sight on the main roads, and everyone is following the weather!

Pinot Gris being loaded to be whole bunch pressed

If any of you have any questions for us on the 2011 vintage do post them below and I will put it to Simon so he can answer your questions for you!

Over the next couple of weeks I will be blogging from afar and today [actually the 19th of November - Meg] I am in Shanghai, China. Simon, Jason, and I arrived a couple of days ago and have been catching up with our distributor William Feng. This is my first time in China and it is fascinating. Firstly Shanghai is a big modern city with amazing buildings. We have had a wander about the city center with William and his friend Queenie as our guides, both William and Queenie were educated in New Zealand.

It has occurred to me that this is the first time I have visited a communist country. Shanghai bears no resemblance to the Pearl Buck books I read as teenager, or more lately Wild Swans. There is no visible sign of Mao or the Cultural Revolution. It is modern, bustling, and downtown surprisingly European. When we went out to look at the wine and spirit expo it was all a bit grey. Shanghai is preparing for a World Expo next year and there is construction happening everywhere.

We did visit a beautiful temple downtown and a beautiful older part of the city, Yu Gardens. The traditional architecture was lovely. The highlight and greatest challenge was food. Each day William and his friends Harry and Queenie took us to a different restaurant. The most different from any experience of Chinese food I had had before was the hotpot restaurant. As we waited for a table we were offered plum juice, a shoe shine or to have our nails done with fantastical nail art. We were entertained by acrobatic noodle making. The noodles were stretched and tossed with twirling movements like the ribbons in rhythmic gymnastics. The men drank whiskey with dinner and I tried warm black soybean milk which I was not fond of. Set into the table were two chafing dishes in which we cooked our food. One was chilli based and the other began with mushrooms. The first addition was chucks of ducks blood which I tried and tasted like pate. Then various meats, greens and seafood were added. The fine little white mushrooms were delicious but I just couldn’t do the pigs brains.

Harry, William’s friend drove us about which was amazing as the traffic is crazy as you can expect in a city of 20 million. I find riding to work in little old Blenheim a challenge but bicycle riding in Shanghai is death defying. However they do have cycle lanes. I think this is fundamental to making cycling safer and a real alternative needed at home. The pollution was bad and this makes me despair for our planet but as I sit on an aircraft flying across the world I am conscious that I should remember the old “people in glass houses” moral.

This is another emerging market for us and our first container has landed. We attended a function at New Zealand Central which is run by New Zealand Trade and Enterprise and everyone is very upbeat about the opportunities in China. (Incidentally we had fantastic nibbles whipped up by Martin Bosley who is a great supporter of Astrolabe in Wellington). We felt we were in good hands with William and it was another amazing opportunity to visit another country.

So now I am flying over Russia and we will be in Dublin tonight.

The next contingent leave today. Henry and Meg fly out from Wellington tonight and we will meet them in Dublin tomorrow night. It is so exciting.

- Jane