My Aching Head

Known as the adventure capital of New Zealand (the Pacific? the Southern Hemisphere? the World?) Queenstown is a “must see” place in New Zealand. Aside from Bungy jumping, rafting, canyoning and jetboating it also has a pretty awesome bar and boozing culture. In fact, a lot of kiwis from all over make the trek down south purely for the party. Now, before you turn you away thinking it’s not for you, let me assure you there is something here for everyone.

There is basically 3 types of drinking establishment in Queenstown, Bars, Pubs and backpacker bars. That doesn’t sound like much but there is over 70 liquor licenses in the central business area and probably 30 of those are dedicated to drinking. If you can check out them all in a weekend then Monday morning would definitely be a struggle - infact Monday mornings in Queenstown are nearly always a struggle.

Pubs

The pubs in Queenstown are the places that you go to when you want to kick back, have a sneaky pint or 3, and enjoy the scenery and the weather. Wether it’s by accident or design they are all positioned perfectly to get hours and hours of afternoon and evening sun during summer. The Pig & Whistle, Monty’s and Dux de Lux are the pick of the pubs and all are well worth the time, they all sell cheap pints and decent pub food. It’s worth mentioning that Dux de Lux brews all their own beer on the premises and it is very good. Personally I’m a fan of the Alpine Ale, but there is a flavour for everyone.

If you want a bit more of a “local” experience, try the Frankton Arm Tavern (in Frankton) or the Wakatipu Tavern. Both of them sell cheap grub, beer and feel exactly like your local.

Backpacker Bars

Calling these bars “Backpacker Bars” doesn’t really do them the justice they deserve. If you want to party, Winnies, Frasers, Altitude, Buffalo Club and the World Bar are the places to go. They are all huge places, sell cheap drinks, play cool music and all the tour buses full of people that just want to get loose. It’s best to not leave it too late in the evening to get there. Altitude and Buffalo Club are usually pumping around 10:30, World Bar doesn’t really start hitting it’s straps till midnight.

If you are planning on heading out to these places and you should, then there are always people wandering around town in the evening giving out 2 for 1 vouchers, hit them up for a few. It wouldn’t be a night out in Queenstown without some cheap jaegar bombs at Frasers, some horizontal bungy at Altitude, standing by the fire at the Buff and a teapot from the World. Teapot? It’s a tasty tasty cocktails served in a teapot with a few shot glasses, not really worth the money, but it’s a must do, you will be asked about it.

Bars

While people mainly think of Queenstown for the big party venues, in my mind it’s the tiny bars that make it. At 3am when the World Bar kicks everyone out on the street there are still places to drink and drink you will. Walking around during the day it’s easy to miss the multitude of tiny establishments but if you look hard enough they are everywhere. Bardeaux, Minibar, Barmuda and Bar-up are all down Searle Lane. They all have a massive range of beer, spirits or wine and will charge you a fortune for the pleasure. That’s not going to stop you though when it’s 4:30am, you are parched and they are the only places open.

Debajo and Tardis are both on Cow Lane and Skybar is just around the corner of Camp and Cow. Skybar is a swanky cocktail bar, where the staff are always friendly and will be happy to have a chat and a drink. Debajo is a tiki-style bar that always plays funky dance music. Tardis is the only place in town where you’ll hear good hip-hop maybe with the possibility of a live MC. If you are in town in May, make sure you checkout the Sugardaddy competition, it just might make your winter, or break your wallet.

The rest of the bars are scattered around the place, The Boiler Room and Minus 5 are in the wharf, Eichardts is on the water-front on Marine Parade, Sub-culture is underneath Montys and Harry’s Pool Bar is near Buffalo Club. Each of these places has it’s own attraction, Boiler Room plays the cheesiest of the 80s and 90s on the weekends, the locals love it so it’s usually pretty busy. Minus 5 is an ice bar, it’s pretty expensive but worth a look. Subculture is the closest to Queenstown’s only dance club, and the drum and bass pumps until the wee hours of the morning and Harry’s is the only place in town with more than a couple of pool tables. Finally, Eichardts is the house bar of an extremely exclusive hotel but the bar is open to all comers. The cocktail list is extensive, varied and made with the freshest of ingredients. Eichardts is my favourite bar in Queenstown, regardless of it being more expensive, closed after 11 and super-pretentious.

Food

Come the end of the night you are going to be stumbling the streets looking for some sort of actual sustenance, something big, something greasy and something fast. There are 2 options, Fergburger and the Night and Day (the locals call it the 2-4.) Fergburger is an amazing gourmet burger place that sells expensive hamburgers which taste amazing and you will inhale with glee in a drunken stupor but, I recommend saving the Ferg until you are sober you will enjoy it more. The 2-4 sells all you need, deep fried lasagne, cordon bleu (whatever that is,) nachos, wedges and my personal favourite lamb shanks

That’s pretty much all there is to say about Queenstown, except for 1 bar. I’m not really sure where to classify it and even less sure what to say about it, but Chicos is a Queenstown institution. It’s been there as far as I can tell forever and it wouldn’t surprise me if the same reggae/dub cover band has been playing for just as long. I’ve been going there for a year and a half and they haven’t changed their set. If you are in town, Chicos is upstairs on the mall and it’s the sort of place that you just might well stumble into having an awesome night at. Last time I checked they sold $2 beers between 10:30 and 11:30 every night, it’s definitely worth stopping in for one.

The theme for MxMo this month is Made from Scratch having never really delved into the homemade ingredients side of things before I wanted to start with something basic. I recalled seeing a post from Stevi at Two At The Most for a recipe of ginger syrup, so I got to work. I actually wanted the syrup to be a little bit more gingerbread-like so I also added a bit of ground cinnamon. That’s what you can see floating in the drink in the photo.

Now it seems like quite an easy thing to make, but I managed to forget it was on the stove and let it reduce down to a very thick treacle like substance. Adding some more water brought the consistency back but the flavour was a little bit more bitter than it probably should have been.

I then decided on some sort of rum based cocktail. I’m not entirely sure what to call it but here is the recipe

• 3/4 oz Mt Gay rum
• 3/4 oz Bombay Sapphire
• Half a lime of lime juice
• 3/4 oz homemade ginger syrup

Shake and strain over ice. Top up with soda.

Entertainingly enough the syrup wasn’t the only thing homemade used while making this, I dropped (and broke) the only boston in the house so I had to use a coffee mug as the other side of the shaker.

For quite some time now I have been chasing a crazy cocktail, a cocktail of which one of the main ingredients is Brie. Finally I have finally done it, while it’s not something I will probably ever make again, it was tasty but the process of making it just isn’t that workable.

Brandied Brie

• 45ml Remy VSOP brandy
• 15ml Grand Marnier
• 30ml apple juice
• 2 wedges of Brie, one for garnish

Put the brandy in a brandy glass and set on fire. Using a toothpick or a fork, melt one of the wedges of Brie over the flame letting the melted cheese drop into the brandy. When all the cheese has been melted add the Grand Marnier and the juice and leave to cool. Strain into a champagne flute and garnish with Brie. Optionally replace the apple juice with champagne.

There is a couple of things to note, the glass that you melt the cheese into is not going to be easy to clean. Best bet is to soak it with some detergrent. Secondly, a regular strainer is also going to be really hard to strain, so best off using some sort of disposable filter. These 2 problems and the fact that the fluid itself doesn’t look very appealing kind of make this quirky drink a bit of a let down. Well worth trying once though.

Wine is one of these strange things that a lot of young people drink and love but they don’t become passionate about it until they get older. Peregrine winery, however isn’t the sort of place that is stuck in the same old stereotypes of old people, old buildings and old traditions. It’s hard to expect anything of the sort as you drive down the driveway, the massive white roof of the winery catches your eye, sticking out in a strange harmony with the landscape.

It’s quite difficult to actually see what you are looking at until you get closer, the judges of some bigwig architecture prize described it as “an elegant blade of light” and that “the age-old process of making wine has been radically reinterpreted for our time”. Not really sure how a building reinterprets the wine making process, but each to their own. I think the beauty of the building is it’s multiple purposes - not only does it reduce the cooling costs of the winery, but it acts as a concert stage.

Concert stage you may ask? It turns out that Central Otago summer is perfect for producing wine as the number of awards Peregrine has won attests to. The summer is also perfect for sitting on the lawn, enjoying some good wine, taking in the scenery and listening to awesome bands, Fat Freddy’s Drop and Jose Gonzalez in recent times. Needless to say, the wine flows freely and the weather is great.

Peregrine Winery is a must stop on your way through the Gibbston Valley, preferably in summer when a band is playing but if it’s winter and the mountains are snow capped the wine will still taste great.

Driving into Queenstown is quite an experience, following the winding Kawarau River down through the Gibbston Valley and the Kawarau gorge is the sort of drive that you can’t stop looking around in amazement. The problem with looking around with your mouth wide open, is that you might miss the amazing vineyards either side of the road. Now it isn’t just the architecture and landscapes they are built on either, rumour has  it that the Pinot Noir is pretty good. Today, I took the opportunity to test that theory - I woke up around 1, jumped in the car and headed to the closest (well not the closest) but the first winery.

Chard Farm, is a beautifully understated vineyard perched on the cliffs of the Kawarau gorge on the old (1860) Cromwell-Queenstown road. The buildings are massive Tuscan-inspired warehouses which were built in 1993 specifically for the vineyard. It is one of the oldest wineries in the area and certainly feels like it truly is part of Central Otago - the clerk at the cellar door spoke like he had been a part of the furniture for the best part of the last 40 years and the wine wasn’t too bad either.

We started by tasting the “CO2″ the 21st birthday bubbly, it’s a really refreshing and light bubbly, which really doesn’t have too much more than bubbles in common with champagne. The unwooded chardonnay was a very easy drinking white with very subtle flavours, it’s certainly not what I think of when I think Chardonnay. The Pinot Noirs were all good, if a little too subtle with “2006 the Viper” being my pick, it has a great peppery note and blackberry flavours. Probably the spiciest of the wines we tasted.

At the end of the day, I wish I had have been to Chard Farm last, I think I would have appreciated it more at the time.

I’m a huge fan of cheap good wine, happy to drink good quality boxed wine and certainly not turned off by a $4 bottle - so long as it tastes good. But currently I have a glass of Yalumba Cabernet Sauvignon 2007 in front of me, and let me tell you I’m not that impressed. It’s one of the “premium cask wines” just like the Banrock Station wine I’ve written about before and it might be harsh on the Yalumba, but it just doesn’t match up against the Banrock.

Before I start talking about the wine itself I think it’s important to mention that by all reports the 2007 vintage in the Barossa valley was extremely hard for the growers, with a late frost and some heavy rainfall damaging a great amount of the harvest. This may well explain the low quality - especially because this box is of the 2007 vintage, as compared to most cask wine which is blended.

On the nose there is a definite smell of blackcurrant, and a slightly unwelcome hint of menthol. The taste is not what I have become used to from cheap Australian wines, which normally provide a somewhat balanced taste. It lacks body, tastes young (yes, I realise it is young) and has a touch of alcohol aftertaste. It’s not all bad though, it is quite easy drinking which isn’t always the case for cheap cabernet sauvignon’s and definitely is very good value drinking.

Recently Monteiths Brewing company has released a limited release beer celebrating 140 years of brewing. It is supposed to be brewed in the style of the 18060s, which due to the fact that I’m a  child of the 1980s I can’t comment on. Now, I’m not a fan of a limited release consumable of anything, least of all beer, it’s one of those things give me a taste of something that I might fall in love with and then cut off the supplier. Anyway, to the meat of it all, the beer.

When I first tasted it I wrote in my notes that it was a “subtle flavour” but now when I sit down with a bottle of it I’m thinking to myself just how flavoursome it is. This flavour certainly isn’t a refined clear crisp taste but more of a harsh fruit taste. The beer has a cloudy texture, kind of like someone has mixed in a bit of dirt to each bottle. I’m not sure if it’s the actual flavour or this texture, but It reminds me a lot of a Coopers Pale Ale.

It definitely isn’t an easy drinking beer, the first half a glass didn’t slide down like the other Monteiths do but once your palate has adapted to the interesting flavour it is a much different story. This isn’t a bad thing, I have a problem with a lot of the new beers brought onto the market being devoid of any beer-like flavour.

All in all, I enjoyed the Monteith 140, but I probably won’t be sucking back too many of them. It is only available at Monteith’s bars or in 4-packs from some bottle shops and supermarkets. I could only find it at New World in Queenstown and at the princely sum of $14 for 4 it isn’t even close to being affordable. Next time I’m at Monty’s though I’ll give a few more pints a go, I suppose I might as well enjoy it while it lasts.