Cromwell

Unfortunately, we spent less than 24 hours in Cromwell, the major town in the Central Otago wine region. I must admit that until I spoke to Len Thwaite, our host when we would stay in the Timaru area, I really did not even know of Central Otagos wine existence. Up until then my sum knowledge of Otago was that it had a rugby team and had produced many All Blacks. I quickly researched Central Otago from a wine perspective and it soon became clear that while very new it was gaining a considerable reputation for its wine, particularly for its Pinot Noir.

Cromwell turned out to be a very pleasant town. Nestling in one of those typically wide glacier carved valleys on the side of a lake, Lake Dunstan, it was once a mining town aand up until the advent of wine was known as a mjor fruit producer.

The Central Otago has promoted itself as one of only three places in the world that can, for terroir and climatic reasons, grow the Pinot Noir grape, a notoriously hard grape to grow and get great wine from. The other two place incidentally are Orego in the USA and of course Burgundy, France, the home of great Pinot Noir wines. In the few hours we were in Cromwell we were able to taste several of the local wines and can say that subject to may more hours of future tasting their claim may well be true, well at least the part that says they can produce good Pinot Noir wine.

We did not arrive in Cromwell so we just booked in to our hotel The Golden Gate Lodge, and set about looking for somewhere to eat. To cut a long story short we ended up by eating in the Lodge. (see The Golden Gate Lodge Post)

The next morning after an excellent breakfast we booked out and we went first to Old Cromwell, which has been left or restored to how it was in the old mining days. We spent a very pleasant three quarters of an hour in the town and on the lakeside upon which it sits before moving on to do some wine tastings at the Wooing Tree and Rockburn.

We finished up at the Big Picture which is a sort of Restaurant/Café and a wine retail outlet with a fil based wine tasting experience. We just want a quick lunch before getting under way to Timaru our next port of call. While waiting for lunch I managed to do a little tasting of a couple of Pinot Noirs and Chardonnay.

I would really have liked to have spent more time in the Cromwell area as I think the wines merit much more time.