Mainly Martinborough, plus Kumeu River

After the New Zealand love-in that was the excellent Pinot Noir NZ celebration in Wellington (on which I will be reporting in more detail next week, with tasting notes on 185 NZ Pinots, including many enthusiastic ones about Martinborough wines) I spent a couple of days revisiting Martinborough, the wine region closest to the New Zealand capital and the country’s first source of interesting Pinot Noir. Partly thanks to this proximity, it has long been a magnet for thirsty and greedy tourists. In fact I was told that there were so many tourists in the 1980s that some cellar doors...