Modern Wine Tastings!

Different lifestyles demand adapted solutions for various people, people in my biz mean people relating in one way to another to alcoholic beverages mostly wines and beers being the topics. Another element is transport, putting it simple is the wine bottle coming to you or are you going to the bottle’s place of origin, to visit its maker….

In other words, before you select to buy a wine one should taste the wine.

The old European way to do this was pack some bags, toss them in your car and pass by the various Chateau, Quintas, vineyards etc . etc. invited or uninvited, reservations booked or not….

In the modern age of wine producing, vineyards have opened themselves up to wine enthusiasts, professionals or amateur, and the wine tastings are not any more what they used to be. Sipping wine alone is experienced as a low adrenaline activity and should not be an object on itself, surely not if one has to cross half the globe to discover and taste new wines in third world countries.

The days a Belgium or Swedish wine loving couple traveling past a glorious string of French domains tasting grands crus by the dozens and have hundreds of cases shipped to their private residences climatized wine cellar whilst wining and dining their nights away catered by the local grand chefs and mostly finishing of their trips in the Hotel de Paris in Nice wasting the left over financials in the local casino or finally heading to the Carlton or Majestique on the Croisette in Cannes.

Well, this still exists but became a rarity as modern lifestyles demand complementary physical action. The most extreme way I came across is the, in my opinion, not preplanned way the New Zealand wine producing community solved the problem in a certainly exiting manner.

How do you get a winelover who has just flown maybe 24hrs plus from let’s suggest Montreal to New Zealand’s South Island Central Otago wine region enthused not only wine tasting but create the parameters that the brave souls might return another time.

Apart from the Lord of the Ring’s mountainous spectacular sceneries where the world’s most southern wine producing regions are located, they are as result more than only photogenic, one should visit the region in the late New Zealand summer when the grapes are a month or so away from the first pickings, specific region to hit on should be Central Otago, around the Kawaru Bridge spanning the Kawarau river which flows through the valley’s deeply cut gorge towards Lake Dunstan. Around this bridge various wine estates are located and are producing good wines, whilst tasting these wines one can watch daredevils leaping from the Kawarau bridge, on the world’s first bungee-jumping outposts.

One could conclude stating “In New Zealand, why jump when one can sip? A South Island region offers tastings amid high-ad reline activities!”

Between the classic old Europe’s way to taste wines and the bungee-jumping variant in New Zealand an enormous scala of wine tastings attractions have been created over the last decades or so. Basically general health environment rules dictate the modern human to balance the wine intake with adequate sportive activities, in other words the commonly accepted rule of the famous two (2) glasses of (preferable re) wine a day are usually exceeded, even when one spits the tasted wine into the designated disposal containers, during wine tasting sessions, and modern society prescribes vigorous physical exercises on-the-wine-spot, vineyards all over the world start to rethink this and the industry comes with surprising solutions, I thought that my readers never thought about the combination of tasting new world wines and bungee-jumping in Lord of Rings territory!