Midge bytes

My first couple of weeks have gone well and amazingly fast!  I have my own row of Pinot Gris to tend, with a partner…who happens to come from Somerset, which I found quite amusing.  So far we have leaf plucked (to expose the grapes to sunshine to aid ripening) and calculated possible yield (about half a tonne or 500kg if you prefer).  This is a huge crop for a single row of 72 vines, so we weren’t too irritated by a wax-eye (small hungry bird) which we had to chase out from under our bird net yesterday.  We only need about 85kg for our micro-vin project (making wine out of same grapes).  I’m really enjoying having lectures and popping up to the vineyard for some viticulture in between (or herbology as I’m thinking of it!)  I definitely feel like I’m at Hogwarts!

Winemaking and viticulture aside, the course is pretty fast paced science so my brain is definitely getting a work out, they are making me study economics and engineering, neither of which actually work very well in my head…I may have to pay someone to do those bits in future!  Hopefully I will be able to get the hang of them though!

We’ve been on three field trips to five different wineries so far, which have been informative and fun (we did get to try some wine).  I’ve also had a play up in the university winery today helping two former students bottle some 2006 Chardonnay.  I got to do the screw capping, quite a satisfying machine!  They kindly gave me a bottle, which I shall comment on in a month or so, as they suggested I left it in bottle for at least a month.

I actually left Canterbury for the first time last weekend and traversed the country all the way to the West coast, to Hokitika, where there was a Wildfoods festival.  Wild is definitely the right word as they were serving grubs and grasshoppers and mountain oysters amongst many other scary things.  I tried the mountain oysters, which is a euphemism for something not very nice at all, definitely involving tubes!  Luckily it was barbequed and surrounded by bread and onions so mostly disguised!  The festival was only a small part of the weekend, the main focus for Kiwis being drinking, which they do abundently and messily.  I enjoyed the scenery and tried to avoid being vomited on.  We made friends with lots of people, mostly from the Christchurch area, it seems that there was a mass exodus to the other side of the country!  The drive over was gorgeous, we crossed the Southern Alps at Arthurs Pass, going past all the closest skiing areas…very pretty!  It took about five hours to get to the other coast.
 
We camped in the garden of a backpackers hostel…was quite glad not to be inside as the owner had taken out all the beds for the weekend and just laid wall to wall mattresses down…which looked a trifle too cosy with strangers for my liking!  However the tent did get washed away by rain so not much sleep happened in any case.  We spent Saturday night by a bonfire on the beach, there were fires right the way along the beach, which was very pretty, despite the occasional rain shower.

I got a job today, in the university bar ‘Mrs O’s’, which I start tomorrow!  I’m very pleased about that, they seem like nice people to work for, at the ‘interview’ this evening I was fed and they will pay me for it   Which was a nice surprise! 

I think that about sums it up for the moment, we’re having a party on Friday, to which we invited some of the people we met at the festival and I have a huge and slightly alarming amount of reading and writing to do…all about wine though, which seems to help!