It is about midday on Monday April 7 2003 when we arrive at our hotel in the center of Auckland: at that moment it is 2 a.m. in Belgium and the travelling took us approximately 36 hours. We already picked up our rented car (not easy at the beginning, driving a car in which all the controls are inversed in a dense traffic) and a few hours later we leave for Henderson, a rather large suburb of Auckland, to visit the headquarters of Babich Wines. Except for Martin Tutty, on mission in Europe, the whole team is present: the brothers Joe and Peter Babich, David Babich (the son of Peter) and his wife Julie, and their collaborators Maureen Radford and John Lang.
Enjoying a cup of coffee we first discuss about the market situation and the future of  the Babich wines in Europe. David makes a plea for the use of the Stelvin stoppers (the kind of screwcorks we normally use for other drinks such as aperitifs) in the place of corks: these stoppers have the great advantage to keep the wine perfectly pure, and Babich Wines uses them already for certain markets. Sooner or later this screw cork will also make it in Europe, but our consumers are not ready yet to accept it (he associates such a stopper with lemonade or with a low-quality product; for many people, the ritual around the service of a good wine is still extremely important).
I hear that the harvest, which is still going on in the Marlborough region, is a bit more difficult as usual: in contrast with other years, there was some rain the last weeks, and that caused problems of botrytis here and there. Especially for the area of Marlborough this is abnormal: sometimes there is no rainfall at all during 6 or 7 months (the rain coming from the west is stopped by the range of mountains in the center of the South Island), and without irrigation it would not be possible to grow anything. The volume produced in 2003 will be reduced: because of the severe frost in spring, many of the producers lost 40 to 50 % of their harvest; Babich could limit the damage to approximately 20% by using a helicopter.
We go on with a visit to the installations. I can see how the situation in the different vineyards is followed from here: every day, faxes arrive from Hawke’s Bay and Marlborough with the informations concerning the evolution of the maturity of the grapes, and so the right decisions are made in consultation with the men in the field. After the harvest, the grapes or the juice (for the basic wines such as the East Coast pinot noir) are transported from Hawke’s Bay to Henderson in cooled trucks or by train (this transport takes approximately 8 hours). The production in Henderson has decreased because of the expansion of the city of Auckland (many former vineyards are now residential districts), and also because the production in the more interesting soils of Hawke’s Bay and Marlborough has been increased.
The warehouses and vinification rooms are well organized; the company has a big storehouse for the barrels, where I see primarily French barrels, from Radoux for instance. The winemaking is done in large stainless steel tanks with temperature control (by water circulation in closed circuit), with automatic “pigeage”; for the Patriarch cabernet-sauvignon Joe Babich prefers to use small concrete tanks and to make the pigeage by hand. There is an air-conditioned storehouse (at 10°) for the slow fermentation and ageing in new oak barrels of the top chardonnay wines (Irongate and Patriarch).
At the end of our visit, the Babich family offers us some bottles of wine to drink during our trip through New Zealand; besides wines we already know we will enjoy also the viognier 2002 (fresh, pure, with a good typicity and a nice length) and the Winemakers’ Reserve Gewürztraminer (very spicy, complex and powerful with a fresh touch of mint)!

The following days we travel through the Northern Island and we discover that it is not without reason if New Zealand is characterized as a clean and green country: nature is splendid with a very rich fauna and a flora, even if the European settlers destroyed the original forest nearly completely ... We can still admire the last remainders of the Waipoua forest, and make a trip by boat in the Bay of Islands (the name says enough) starting from the small town of Russell: a beautiful trip between the islands with qualified people who give us the occasion to see from nearby the orcs, the dolphins, the schools of fish and a young seal. More in the south we discover another wonder of nature: the geothermic phenomena of the “Hidden Valley” of Orakei Korako (a multicoloured silica terrace, geysers and boiling mud pools). A marvellous walk in a beautiful green valleywhere the multicoloured silica terrace pours into a lake.

Orakei Korako

We are now close to Napier, a nice small city in art déco style very close to the vineyards of Hawke’s Bay; in Fernhill, a village in the south of Napier, we have an appointment with Jim Hamilton, the person in charge for the vineyards of Babich Wines in Hawke’s Bay. Jim is a man of experience: David would tell me later that Jim planted the first vines of sauvignon blanc in Marlborough. He takes us first to a vineyard of merlot in Fernhill, where the grapes are not yet harvested, an exception at that moment; according to Jim the soil (silt deposited by the river) is too rich for merlot, it should be replaced by viognier (the viognier seems to be in the mood in New Zealand!). Then he shows us the Ohiti vineyard which will produce next year for the first time merlot, cabernet-sauvignon, malbec and chardonnay, on a calcareous soil. Of course, we finish our visit with the Gimblett Road vineyard, planted in the ancient riverbed of the Ngaruroro river. This vineyardhas a very deep (up to 30 meters) sandy and gravelly soil, and Jim shows us the hole he dug to show the structure of the soil. Due to the very permeable character of the soil, the vines have very deep roots and the yield is naturally limited. Babich was the first to plant vines here: this is the place where the chardonnay, the cabernet-sauvignon and the merlot for the Irongate and Patriarch range grow, but also the syrah, the pinotage and the gewürztraminer for the Winemakers’ Reserve.

-> The soil of Gimblett Road

We continue our trip towards the south and arrive at Wellington, where we take the opportunity to visit the new museum Te Papa dedicated to the nature and the culture of New Zealand. The next day (on Monday) we will take the ferry to the South Island.

If you want to visit the Marlborough vineyards, the best place to stay is Blenheim, the most important city of the wine region and ideally located for the visit. John Sowman, the responsible for Babich in Marlborough, is very busy with the harvest, so we agree to meet him in the vineyard of the Awatere Valley (the Awatere and the Wairau are the most important rivers in the Marlborough region). John seems very capable ans accurate, and he answers our questions while he leads us through the carefully kept vineyards. We learn that the Awatere river continuously moved its course through the centuries, by eroding the porous slope of sandstone. Thus, the river formed the terraces made up of one meter of silt on a thick layer of gravels, an ideal soil for the vine.

The Awatere vineyard

He confirms that there is more rain this year than usually, with some botrytis problems as a consequence. In case of big botrytis problems, the only solution is to send people into the vineyards to remove the most touched grapes before the harvesting machine arrives, but this has not been necessary. In general, the volume of the harvest will be about normal for Babich Wines, approximately 10 tons per hectare (which corresponds to 70 hl/ha), in spite of the late frosts. John thinks that it makes no sense to try to lower the yields: if you prune more, the plant develops a too vigorous vegetation which results in too much shadow, and then the wine develops a less ripe style with green and herbacious aromas. At this moment, the birds are the enemies of the ripe bunches: they are chased with gun shots, artificial falcons and hooting motorcyclists.