Peregrine Winery

If ever there was a reason to start enjoying wine, it would have to be a trip to Peregrine Vineyards and Winery in Queenstown, New Zealand.

For someone who didn’t start to drink until 24, the experience of going from drinking nothing to drinking some of the best wine in the world is a heady one. My first peek into the world of Peregrine came with a visit to the Queenstown Food & Wine Festival in 2004, and besides making me an immediate fan of the whole Central Otago region, it opened my eyes to what a fine wine really tasted like.

From humble beginnings - what Peregrine refers to as a stage when the winery was ‘virtual’ - Peregrine is now the most outstanding winery in Central Otago.

Its huge, graceful wing-span roof (inspired by the Peregrine Falcon) gets your immediate attention as you pass through the Gibbston Valley and if you stop off to have a look around, you won’t be disappointed.

Every view around the winery could be framed for a postcard, so it’s hard to believe that this is also the location of a thriving wine label that has re-defined the way wine is made in this region.

Instead of using grapes from only one vineyard, Peregrine helped pioneer the strategy of using grapes from multiple vineyards to ensure the best grapes are used at the best times. This also helps alleviate the inherent risks in the region, the worst of which is frost in spring and autumn.

Peregrine is a wine that is so highly sought after that sometimes the demand around the world means New Zealand is struggling to get any for itself. This premium standard is not just hype though; Peregrine wines have achieved some of the highest awards possible in the wine world, and some of those awards were for its Pinots, which the wine fraternity had believed were ‘un-growable’ in what is the world’s southern-most wine region.

I can’t recommend a trip to Peregrine highly enough. But make sure you have a firm idea of how much you can spend at the Cellar Door, or else you may get yourself into a little trouble.

Peregrine Wines Central Otago Limited, Kawarau Gorge Road, RD 1, Queenstown,, New Zealand. + 64 3 442-4000 or 0800 PEREGRINE; www.peregrinewines.co.nz