Last week, on about Thursday, Vince and I decided to get away for the weekend. As I hadn't been to the wine country yet, and he's had to listen to me grumping about missing the Barossa Valley in South Australia (an hour outside of Adelaide, used to go there A LOT and visit vineyards and drink really good wine), we decided to go to Martinborough which is this teeny little town in the Wairapapa and the hub of the wine area.

The picture is of the Martinborough hotel. It used to be a complete dump and then some wealthy real estate agent/developer from Wellington swanned out to Martinborough in his flash car, bought it and spent $4.5 million NZ doing it up. This story was from the slightly embittered French cafe owner across the street. That was an interesting cafe. The food was/could have been quite good actually but there was something just a bit off...the first thing was the music, Julio Iglesias, doing COVER VERSIONS of everything from Celene to Foreigner, it was truly henious.

We started with soup, and I ordered mushroom and I swear it was probably the best mushroom soup I have ever tasted. Thick and dark with LOADS of mushrooms and wine but it was cold. Vince's was leek and potato and it was also delicious but not hot enough either. For my main I ordered poisson (a small chicken like bird) (half a poisson actually) and it was served with 'pommes frittes' and vegetables. The 'pommes frittes' (fries) were instant ones, I swear to God. The poisson was *really really good* but the fries, although cooked perfectly, hot and crispy STILL came out of a bag.

Dessert and the dessert wine in particular was excellent but the apple tart thing should have been heated up.

Vince is back from his walk and I feel guilty for not being healthy and going. I am going to go with him tomorrow I am just SUCH a morning person ( I can hear you all laughing from here).

We bought half a dozen bottles of assorted wine, 2 bottles of very expensive sticky's, some cab sav (just divine) and a bottle of traminer (which is just nectar) and some sav blanc. I do like my wine.