Greetings from New Zealand

Greetings from sunny Blenheim, New Zealand! I have just finished my first day working on the 2009 harvest for Mud House Wines and let me just say... what a difference from most of the Oregon wineries. Mud House is absolutely huge and some of the tanks are epically and almost inconceivably large. Just for sheer comparison, Elk Cove (the winery where I worked the 2008 harvest) processed a total of 660 tons of grapes this past year with 5 full-time harvest interns. Mud House is anticipating over 7000 tons this vintage alone, employing a whopping 18 interns. It's going to be a lot of work over the next two months, but luckily we have a lot of help on hand.

Making our task even more daunting, Christina and I just arrived in Blenheim at about 7:30 last night. Our journey began with a 20-hour flight from Portland to Christchurch (via San Francisco and Auckland). Christchurch is deservingly known as the most English of all New Zealand cities, so it comes as no surprise that while we were having a pint at a bar called His Lordship's Tavern a drunken Brit came up to us at a table, drunkenly expounded his love for Christina, and then proceeded to ever-so-awkwardly grab me by the head and kiss me on the ear. Ah, the most English of all New Zealand cities, indeed. We woke up early the next day and went to the beautiful (and free!) botanical gardens before taking a 5 and a half hour, supposedly air-conditioned bus ride to our final destination of Blenheim.

Our first day was truly more of an orientation/meet-and-greet sort of deal, but just the same we'll call it "work". With 18 of us interns, it was a job just remembering everyone's name. By my count we have 6 Americans, 5 Frenchies, 4 Italians, 1 German, 1 Chilean, and 1 Japanese-New Zealander. It's a pretty diverse crew and all but 2 of us have at least one harvest under our belt. The vast majority of us are living in the intern house about 15 minutes away from the winery. So far I'm in a room with three other guys: Tom from Brighton, England who is here on his first harvest, Gerard, who unbeknownst to Christina and I worked at Patton Valley Vineyards (literally 5 minutes away from us at Elk Cove in Oregon) and apparently took the same flight as us from San Francisco to Christchurch, and Heath, who escaped Dallas for the greener pastures of Napa over the last couple of years. It's exciting here at the house, but Christina and I might have the opportunity to stay with one of the winery's viticulturalists for free. We'll see...

In the mean time we are expecting a pretty slow start to the harvest because it's still super warm and sunny, which the vines are loving. So it looks like we'll be getting this Wednesday and Thursday -- and most likely this weekend -- entirely off. But hang in there with me, harvest will undoubtedly heat up over the next two months and I'll continue to post updates throughout my time here in New Zealand.

P.S. - I'll upload some pictures shortly!