Mt Adde

I’m just leaving Mt Adde vineyard and farm in Seddon, which so far wins the “best daily views” award of my HelpX positions. We’re nestled in the Awatere Valley between Blenheim and Kaikoura, and from the high points of the farm I can see out to the ocean on one side and over miles of vineyard to the mountains on the other. Ron grew up here, and he and his wife Helen added the vineyard to the property about ten years ago. They’re working on passing the torch to their son later this year, and then he’ll be in charge of 80 acres of vineyards and about 2000 sheep and cows.

Sunrise

View from the main road towards the farm

Happy cows

The sheep farming is done quite differently here than it was in Fairlie for various reasons. To start, these are corriedale sheep rather than merino, and among other traits they’re about twice as big. In Fairlie I was able to lift a sheep up with all my effort, but these ones can take me for a ride! I was in charge of moving the swing gate in the yards one morning to sort out two different groups, and accidentally let a few through in the wrong direction. Then I had to go into the mob and grab the one with the wrong colored mark on its head to get it back with the right group. When they’re all crowded in it was easy enough to catch up to the one I wanted and jump on top of it (I finally hugged a sheep!) but then no matter how hard I tried to dig my feet in, I was going to be pulled along wherever that irritated sheep wanted to go. Luckily the temporary farm manager, Adam, was bigger than them and could actually move them around.

This farm was also much smaller than in Fairlie, so it was reasonable to drive through the entire property to deliver food or check up on the animals. I rode around with Adam or Ron on a few occasions to bring peas to the sheep and hay to the cows. It was no free ride – I had to open and close about fifteen gates along the way. The animals absolutely loved it, though. They’d hear the truck coming and start mooing or baaing, respectively, and running towards us. (Side note: No sheep here make the nice baa noise that I expected. Rather, it’s a guttural/congested coughing noise that I find pretty hilarious.) It’s up here that I got some of the best views out over the surrounding vineyards and to the ocean and mountains.

Adam chatting with the cows before breakfast

Sheep happily tucking in to some peas

More cows!

Mountaintop views

Documenting work

Helen and Ron’s vineyard is solely Sauvignon Blanc grapes. They are contract growers for Oyster Bay, meaning that they’re monitored throughout the growing season and as long as their grapes meet certain standards of sugar content and acidity at harvest, Oyster Bay incorporate them into their bottling for the year. Unlike some other wineries (according to what Helen and Ron say), Oyster Bay only does one bottling per year, so if you buy a bottle that says 2013, it will taste exactly the same as all the other bottles of that type made in 2013. With that information, they estimate that their grapes make up about 10% of every bottle of Sauvignon Blanc that Oyster Bay sells. They say it’s available in the US – I would recommend it if you can find it!

Harvest should be coming up soon. I went out with Ron on one of my first days to collect grapes for a Brix (sugar) test, and he has done two since then. This is the last of the qualifications that they’re waiting to reach before they can harvest. We drove around in a little go-kart type vehicle, stopping every ten rows or so to pick a stem of grapes into a bag for testing. It felt like a waste at first, but I soon realized that there was plenty left over. I spent about four days riding the go-kart or walking up and down the rows tucking vines back into their wire frames and saw more grapes than probably the rest of my life combined in that time.

Endless rows of vines

Bunches and bunches of grapes

The last aspect of the farm I haven’t touched on is the pet animals. There are eight working dogs, two hen houses packed full, a pig, various barn cats and four puppies. One of the work dogs had 12 puppies a while back. Ten survived, and six have been sold off around the region since then. Of the remaining four, two are destined to be workers, and so very basic training has been started – roughly two minutes per day of sit, stay, stand, etc. Mostly they just get to be playful puppies, though, which I really enjoyed.

Attention-seeking puppy

So all my working days started with letting all the dogs out for a runaround and a play, feeding the pig the house scraps, feeding the chickens and collecting eggs, and then putting all the dogs away. Then, depending on the day, I’d go out as a gate-opener on food deliveries, take the go-kart out to the vineyard, or wait for one of the men and the dogs to bring in a mob of sheep and then help with some kind of sorting. The grossest outcome of this was sorting the ones with dags from the ones without and then shearing off all the poo-encrusted wool around their butts. I didn’t actually do any shearing, but I helped move sheep into the various staging areas and then swept up all the clippings to be used as fertilizer.

My biggest outing of the stay was when Adam and I borrowed the farm truck and did two hikes from my “Off the beaten track” guidebook in one day. The first was an exciting walk up a rocky stream to Sawcut Gorge. I do mean literally up the stream… In some places there was a trail cut up above faster-moving water, but most of the time we sloshed right through the clear water that sometimes came up to my thighs. The reward was a smooth, wavy slice in the rocks that rose almost out of the frame of my camera. This was a case where the journey was as interesting as the destination.

Portrait on the trail

In the gorge

We couldn’t linger for long because we had timed the trip so that we’d be able to head out to the Cape Campbell lighthouse at low tide. This was a simple but long walk along the beach from a campground to the cape, which is the easternmost point on the south island. Some of the hills of the north island were just visible in the distance.

Finally reached the lighthouse

Looking back at where we walked from

The next day I went with Ron and Helen to Yealands vineyard and winery, which was just on the other side of town. This winery is committed to sustainable production and was recently certified as being net carbon zero. Some of their strategies for low energy usage are using the prunings from the grape vines to burn and heat various vats in the winery, and getting in a special breed of short sheep to eat down the grass between the vineyard rows instead of mowing. What makes all this more impressive is the size of the vineyard they’re working with – 2500 acres all in one place! This gives them lots of different types of grapes and they do lots of different bottlings of different wines and blends throughout the year. We did a tasting of five wines and a port. The region is definitely known for Sauvignon Blanc, and their prizewinning 2012 was great, but I also thought that their Tempranillo was really interesting – spicy and fruity.

The grapes get ocean views

Tasting tasty wine

So today I’m on my way to Nelson, where I’m going to stay with Brooke from Martin Bay’s mom for a few days before I head into Abel Tasman national park. I’m doing a five day coastal walk, staying in huts along the way. Luckily I finished another hat while at Mt Adde, so I should be able to keep myself warm. The days are getting shorter and the mornings colder now – autumn is definitely on the way.

Sadly this is another pictureless post. I feel like I’m teasing you by telling you that I’m seeing so many beautiful things and not sharing them, but I’ll try to catch up soon. The problem I’m running in to is that in New Zealand, home internet plans are usually metered, so a family has an allowance of say 5 GB per month. This stems from the fact that New Zealand is so far from the rest of the world and the cables connecting them were so expensive to install. That and the fact that some homes I’m staying at are so isolated that they get their internet via satellite, making it expensive and limited. The Hulsmans must have had a fairly large allowance, because they said I could use it however I liked, but here I was allowed only 30 minutes of internet per day, and no uploads or downloads. I didn’t mention that pretty much everything on the internet is an upload or download of information, but pictures and skyping were definitely off limits. So thanks for your patience!


Update: Now with pictures! And as an added bonus, here's a video of driving on a major thoroughfare.