On the trail of good food and wine
As well as enjoying the products of the many delightful food and beverage businesses in the region, Nelsonians need to go on holiday.
I have taken it upon myself to venture into the tourist trap that is Queenstown and to explore the majestic Central Otago region for great food, wine, beer and artisan products.
For those looking to enjoy great food and beautiful wines, you need to put Central Otago on your holiday shortlist. It’s a wonderfully diverse region and has many things to offer other than the usual tourist attractions.
However, on this trip our focus was less about adventure tourism and more about food and beverage tourism – so as well as visiting some old favourites, we hunted out a few hidden treasures.
From Queenstown, it’s about a 30-minute drive to Arrowtown and Lake Hayes, where a number of wineries have tasting rooms and restaurants; about an hour to Cromwell, where you will find the beautiful Bannockburn wine-producing sub-region; and about an hour to Wanaka.
Queenstown has some fantastic restaurants. All you need to do is wander through town and choose the style of food you feel like.
We had a reservation for lunch at Amisfield, near Lake Hayes. This is a place where you need to book well in advance – we made our reservation in August to make sure we could dine at a reasonable hour, because the last time, the only lunchtime table we could get was at 3pm!
Amisfield specialises in shared plates of perfectly prepared, innovative food, and recently decided to remove choices for diners. Rather than being able to choose from a number of courses to share, or to just ‘‘trust the chef’’, it now offers either a three- or five-course set menu, which changes daily depending on the produce the kitchen can source.
We enjoyed dishes like a white truffle pancake made with a house-made neufchatel cheese rolled in honey and verjus, as well as green and white asparagus sous-vide in oyster plant oil.
The next course was a paua pie made using sustainably farmed paua from Raukaka. With a brisee pastry base, manuka-smoked potato puree and then paua three ways – saute´ ed in garlic, an espuma, and a crisp – this was one of the best paua dishes I have had anywhere.
As if that wasn’t enough, there was also a fish course, a duck course of Canter Valley duck breast, accompanied by two types of purple kumara – a puree and a crisp – and finished with an Amisfield brut and kawakawa sauce.
We finished with a dessert of wild sorrel cre` me brulee topped with purple kumara extraction (sugar from the kumara), with wild sorrel ice cream, garnished with wild wood sorrel.
I made an appointment to meet the marketing team and winemaker at Mt Difficulty Wines, and we tasted its wide range of wines before enjoying lunch looking over the majestic landscape. This is a winery that makes beautiful wines, with a restaurant that serves consistently delicious food.
Then we discovered two new vineyard restaurants.
The first, just down the road from Amisfield, is Akarua. With a winery based at Bannockburn, this venue is much closer to Queenstown and much more accessible – the hop-on, hop-off bus service stops at the front gate. The food here is so good that we decided to go there again before we left.
My final recommendation is Desert Heart Wines on Felton Rd in Bannockburn. The wines are fantastic and aged to perfection. The current release pinot noirs are from 2012 and 2015, with the most expensive being the 2012 Reserve Pinot Noir for $55. If you know anything about Central Otago pinot, you will know this is great value.
When it comes to the food, Desert Heart serves snacks and a platter – the latter is arguably the best food of this style we have had, with home-made duck liver pate (made using its premium pinot noir), edamame bean spread, perfectly cooked lamb loin rounds served with a garlic yoghurt sauce, and lots of other delicious morsels.
For those looking to enjoy great food and beautiful wines, you need to put Central Otago on your holiday shortlist.