LITTLE STOMPER – Orange Wine 2023 When you foot stomp directly in barrels you need small feet to help you. Our families and friends provide no end of ‘little stompers’ to help. No surprise then the resulting wine is an amalgam of old and new knowledge. VINEYARD A small vineyard 83 Church Road, […]
We live in an extraordinary part of the world. We are less than thirty minutes from braided fishing rivers to both the north and the south. One of only three estuaries in our large region is about twenty minutes down the road. One of the most abundant and bountiful ocean spots in the […]
By September things were getting dire. Apples were so far past their best they just weren’t a pleasure to eat anymore. There are only so many oranges you can consume, and by the end of that month their shiny skins were giving way to a dull malleability. Kiwifruit? Done. Supermarket pineapples flown from […]
To be honest I didn’t know whether to write this blog post or not. I considered ‘chickening out’ more than once. Talking about eating meat is fraught in this day and age. It seems to cue an ardent type of anonymous social media vegan. The vegans I know personally accept our meat-eating ways and […]
I’m sure social media has changed foraging. In this super-connected world information that used to be passed along slowly, often by meeting your neighbor at the letterbox, is now distributed to a much wider community instantly. I love that there is still a code and etiquette about foraging information though. Very seldom are […]
I surprised myself by having a little cry in the shower on Sunday morning. It sort of came from nowhere, a mixture of complete joy and total relief after discovering 35mm of rain in the rain gauge. I didn’t realise until that moment just how significant rain, or lack thereof, had become. […]
I love collecting wild food. It involves much effort, sometimes disappointment and now and again bodily injury. Despite this there is such thrill in collecting a feed from something that most people pass by without considering. Often wild food is more intensely flavoured than its cultivated cousins, and its existence and location revealed […]
I know what you’re expecting. The full-blown day of food without a single thing beyond the boundary of this property. Sorry to disappoint. The reality is that on this day of days of food, tradition is way older than the twelve year old Food Farm. That’s not to say that over the […]
I like to think I know this place. You see I have a bit of a thing for wine and food, and have made it my business since returning here (about 12 years ago) to get to know as many wine and food producers in the North Canterbury area as possible. They are my […]
Our lives, twined around vineyards and a small farm, are lived at the pace of the seasons. This sounds idyllic doesn’t it? So turn away now if you’d like to retain the bucolic image you have floating in your imagination. The reality can sometimes be a little more startling and frantic and sleepless than […]
