Sip and slide into spring
Craig Tansley was so caught up in wineries and vistas around Queenstown he almost forget the snowboard in his car.
It should speak volumes that the best run I’ve had all day – and this, at the early stages of a ski holiday – is a chauffeured lift from cutesy Brennan Wines to the swank of Chard Farm Vineyard, deepetched between calico-coloured hills and snowcapped escarpments, beside the world’s first bungy jump.
That’s not to denigrate the ski resorts in this part of the country – on the contrary.
I rode First Tracks with 50 or so skiers at Coronet Peak in the morning and the mountain was covered in 15 centimetres of fresh snow.
It’s just that coming here on a ski holiday should make us rethink the traditional concept of a ‘‘ski holiday’’ (think: wake early, high-tail it to ski resort, park as close to chairlifts as you can, ski, eat, drive home; and repeat ...)
I’ve skied every season for the past 16, and if nothing else, I’ve discovered skiing, or snowboarding, at a major ski resort, should be just a part of what constitutes a good ski holiday.
The major ski resorts around here are all adequate – and boy, do they offer the kinds of vistas that keep Instagram and Facebook in business – but it’s entirely possible to have a great ski holiday here without spending all your time at them.
And no stage of the ski season reflects this more than spring. Most skiers visit in July and August, hoping for more consistent snow. So they miss the quieter times altogether – the longer, warmer days of September and October which offer visitors much more away from the mountains.
And that’s precisely why I’m here on a wine tour that begins at mid-afternoon.
I’ve ridden at a ski resort all morning, but the afternoon offers a whole new perspective on the region.
I’m driven through a landscape that is as lunar as it is Canada on a road that snakes its way high above the Kawarau River whose water is the colour of pounamu.
But in spring, the hawthorn hedge by the roadway turns crimson-red and the hulking willows planted 150 years ago by homesick settlers are bud green and yellow.
It’s warm enough that when I arrive at Brennan Wine I sit at a table in the sun in just a T-shirt, sampling the pinot noirs that make this region world famous. Further up the road – at Chard Farm – the path in goes beside the first road into Queenstown, built for stage coaches in the late 19th century.
In winter, the road is sometimes impassable, but now nothing can stop us. The 80 or so wineries here are some of the globe’s most picturesque, set amongst the wine world’s most challenging topography.
In late spring, when the light won’t dim till 9pm, you can dine at some wineries looking out over their vines.
It snows overnight so I head northeast of Queenstown over the Crown Range towards Wanaka. Just south of the town, I drive up towards Cardrona Alpine Resort along a dirt road cut into the side of a mountain. One hundred metres before the resort’s car park, I find the region’s best kept skiing secret, Soho Basin.
‘‘I got buddies, heli-ski guides, who’ve lived here their whole lives who don’t know about this place,’’ operations manager Mark Dewberry says.
Soho Basin is 264 hectares of private ski area that’s today the sole domain of 12 skiers using the country’s only cat skiing operation. Although it opened three years ago, barely a single skier knows about this place even though Soho Basin can offer the best skiing (and the most luxuriously catered) experience in the southern hemisphere.
I’m shown down mountains, sluicing my way through completely untracked snow … I won’t cross a single track today. I’m permitted to go where I want (you try doing that heli-skiing), so I ride through bowls that look all the way to Queenstown’s Lake Wakatipu.
At the top of Soho Basin, we pause at the peak of Mount Cardrona and I see Mount Cook on the horizon. We ski down to a hut in a valley surrounded on all sides by mountains and eat a threecourse lunch prepared by one of Queenstown’s best winery restaurants, Amisfield Estate. I linger, beside a smoking wood-fire, until my cheeks are as red from the pinot noirs that Amisfield produces as they are from the spring sunshine.
But north of here, Wanaka is fast becoming New Zealand’s hippest spring skiing destination.
There are food trucks and some of the country’s most celebrated new restaurants set beside a glacier-fed lake that covers an entire valley.
There’s a buzz about town that wasn’t here even five years ago, but there’s none of the frenzy of Queenstown at peak season.
Drive another 30km north, following the lake’s edge, and you’ll experience the most unheralded (and yet most respected) ski resort, Treble Cone.
When it has snowed overnight, there is no better ski resort anywhere in the Antipodes. Expert riders congregate here for Treble Cone’s steep in-bound chutes; yet beginners are just as happy staring out over Lake Wanaka from its gentler slopes, watching the kea try to share their lunch.
Back in Queenstown, I sleep in a suite built out over Lake Wakatipu.
From here, I can watch the Remarkables change colours with the sunset – orange to mauve, and everything in-between. In the spring I like that I have time to linger over breakfast here, knowing the crowds of peak season are long gone. And with the long twilights of spring, I have time for golf after skiing.
Six of the country’s highest rated courses are within a 20-minute drive of Queenstown (while a new championship course is being constructed just outside Wanaka).
Nowhere on Earth do golf courses run across such stomachchurning topography, and at Jack’s Point – constructed in the shadow of the Remarkables I just skied, metres from Lake Wakatipu – there are tee-offs high enough above fairways and greens that slope like a ski run.
Leave it to Queenstown, of course, to assimilate the genteel sport of golf with the deathdefying, white-knuckle ethos that rules this town; I discover playing golf here might be best done with a helmet.
And still there’s so much more to do. Queenstown is the adrenaline capital of the world, and Wanaka is only just behind.
I’m so caught up in the thrills and the spills, and the sun-soaked mountain vistas you get around each corner here that if my snowboard wasn’t in my car, I’d likely forget what it was I was here for. – Traveller
❚ Craig Tansley travelled courtesy of Tourism NZ and Air NZ