"You don’t have to be particularly cultured to enjoy Napier but you might find its passion for architecture and fine wine surprisingly contagious. Before long you’ll be blathering on about the Chicago School, Mayan decorative devices and ‘hints of passionfruit on the palate’ with the best of them.
The Napier of today is the silver lining of the dark cloud that was NZ’s worst natural disaster. Rebuilt after the deadly 1931 earthquake in the popular styles of the time, the city retains a unique concentration of Art-Deco buildings. Architecture obsessives flock here from all over the world and the town milks it for all it’s worth. Don’t expect the Chrysler Building – Napier’s Art Deco is resolutely low-rise – but you will find intact 1930s streetscapes which can provoke a Great Gatsby swagger in the least romantic soul.
For the layperson it’s a charismatic, sunny, composed city with the air of an affluent English seaside resort about it."
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A buddy of mine spent the summer in Napier and enjoyed working on a winery but advised that the town was completely dead at night. He was not lying. Napier is definitely more a summer destination and after soaking up sunny skies driving out of Wellington, I endure a steady dark rain for pretty much the rest of the weekend.
A little cold rain would not stop me from having an enjoyable trip. I arrived in Napier to be immediately reminded of Bay St. Louis, Mississippi; a regular get-away destination of my youth. Napier is a small coastal town with lots of beach side motel and restaurants. And like Bay St. Louis it has some unique characteristics that give it a colorful identity. This was showcased at the Criterion Art Deco Backpackers, where I met Collin, an American friend who was doing a quick backpacking tour of New Zealand. The hostel was spacious and like the rest of Napier, empty.
On Sunday morning we asked the lone hostel employee about doing a winery tour and provided the phone number to Grape Escape. I called and we agreed to be picked up outside the hostel at 1:00. This was my first wine tour and it turned out to be a delightful experience. Our tour guide picked us up as promised in a minivan and after gathering two more backpackers from another hostel we were off to our first vineyard. Throughout the day I repeatedly confirmed something that I was already pretty sure about - I don't care for white wines, I like red wines, and I love desert wines. And this was the general serving sequence at each winery. We would taste two to three whites (usually pinot gris and chardonnay), two to three reds (pinot noirs and the regional favorite syrah) and a desert wine. Most of the wineries featured newly constructed modern style buildings that were pleasing to the eye. I felt uncharacteristically stylish sipping wine in these establishments. Upon each arrival we were met with a cheery host who shared lots of interesting facts about their organizations' history and products. I learned more about wine in one day than I had in my entire life. The most interesting bit of information I picked up was that Paul Giamatti's little outburst in Sideways actually had a devastating effect on the sale of Merlot. To my amusement I also learned that the wine that he drinks in the burger joint in the movie is actually......a Merlot. Go figure.
At one of the last wineries we visited, I decided to buy some of the delicious chocolates that we had sampled there. Wanting to have enough to share with my friends back in Wellington, I was contemplating how much to buy when the wine tour guide instructed me not to worry about bringing the Napier chocolate home, but to stop in Greytown at Shoc and get the good stuff there. I took him up on his tip and ended up finding my own little slice of heaven. Shoc produces homemade chocolates in the widest range of flavors I have ever seen; 60 different flavors for their bar chocolates! These include the likes of Lemon and Cracked Pepper, Smoke Paprika, Limechili, and Dark Chocolate with sea salt. I'm not exaggerating when I say these were the most full flavored chocolates I had ever tasted. They blew Godiva out of the water. I ended up spending more money in 10 minutes at the chocolate store than I did in 5 hours visiting 8 wineries. I also realized I had missed my life's calling when I learned that their is such a thing as a Chocologist.
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| http://www.schoc.co.nz/index.php?main_page=index |
While the two days in Napier certainly don't rank high on my most memorable NZ road trips, I really did enjoy all the fine wine and chocolates and I surely will return to Hawkes Bay in the summer.
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