Marlborough

Oh Marlborough...how I miss you already! Our final and best (depending on who you talk to) stop on our 10 day road trip of the South Island was the Marlborough wine region. Also known as the Sauvignon Blanc capital of the world! It was kind of surreal to find ourselves drinking wine in Marlborough. All of those bottles of wine I consumed in Canada with Marlborough labels...I never could have imagined I would actually get to drink those wines from the wineries themselves! The region itself was beautiful as you can see from the pictures, and the wine was equally as delicious. 

So beautiful.

We're in Marlborough!!

Beauty!

We knew we wanted to do a winery tour and who wants to drive on a wine tour?! Enter Bubbly Grape Wine Tours. The van picked us up at 9:30 am (we're on holidays, we are allowed to drink this early ;) We started our day with with six strangers in the van and ended the day as friends - haha maybe not quite, but wine does have that magical power to make people closer! The first winery we visited was Wither Hills - where Will and Kate had visited only the week prior! I'm sure at a normal time of day the wine is delicious, but at 9:30am with the taste of toothpaste still fresh in your mouth, it left something to be desired. In total we visited six wineries and tasted an average of five wines at each winery. That is a lot of wine!!! I was having a sip of each and pouring out the remainder that was in my glass (if I didn't I would have been drunk by our second stop!!) Tyler and mom apparently thought that was a waste of perfectly good wine so they drank every last drop - good for them! I don't think they knew whether they were drinking white or red by the time they got to the sixth winery. Tyler said it all just tasted like "wine" at that point - haha.

Winery #1

Who knew wine grapes would be so delicious to eat?!

Hands down the best Sauvignon Blanc we tasted!

Cheers :)

Gorgeous grounds at Cloudy Bay.

I want this swing in my backyard :)

Mmm mmm

The three amigos :)

We bought wine!

We finally arrived back at our hotel around 5pm after a solid day of wine consumption. Of course we couldn't leave empty handed and managed to buy a few bottles of wine each from our favourite wineries. It was such a great day and we hope to go back to try even more wineries that we didn't get a chance to see. And that concludes our road trip! Just a ferry ride back across the Cook Strait to Wellington and then a four hour drive and we were back home in New Plymouth. We can't wait for more visitors so we can explore all over again somewhere new :)