A daft aroma, an ignorant finish

As you bounce along the Waimarama country road 20 kilometres south of Napier, a sudden, serrated spine of ash-coloured hills rises in a steepening curve to the right. Below the weathered ridge, the ribs of the range stretch down into greener lower slopes that sustain cattle and sheep. Further down, a still, shallow pond captures the hills' every detail in its reflection - like a mirror held up by the earth, demanding its handsomeness be admired again. The whole effect is dramatic and imposing; the hills presiding over surrounding orchards and vineyards like a rugged, forbidding royal family.

I make a special mention of their splendour because that Wednesday, these royals would be outdone. The landscape could not hope to match giddying scale and daunting scope of the ignorance myself and two others would visit upon the Craggy Range winery at the foot of the hills, that Wednesday morning.

There is plenty to see and do around Napier - lovely ocean views, a gannet colony, a water park, cycling tracks through the sun-bathed countryside - but it's the Hawke's Bay's wine that is world famous, and it's the wine we were damned well we were going to taste. No matter that none of our trio had even a passing interest in wine. No matter that we collectively had a kindergarten-level literacy of the subject.

Wine is first meant to be considered at a small distance before it is consumed, apparently - its colour and smell are all supposed to be part of the experience. If the Craggy Range winery staff had studied us for a while after we stepped out of the car, they would have had a taste for the ineptitude that would soon enter their establishment. For a good five minutes we wandered around the premises in search of the tasting room, checking all the way by the laundry, and at one stage squeezing through the gap between a pillar and a gate, seemingly convinced that these people would hide the entrance to their business underneath a doormat, or behind a cluttered shed.

When we stumbled upon the entrance, which was no more than 20 metres from where we had parked, and almost exactly in the centre of the front side of the building, we waltzed in and startled the young lady in charge of the cellar. We were, she said, her first guests of the day. As she produced three white wines and three reds for us to sample, she almost seemed happy. Over the next half hour, we would systematically ruin her morning with our boundless lack of knowledge about wine, proving beyond doubt that we were getting almost nothing out of the wine-tasting experience.

As we began to glug down the samples, we offered questions of profound obtuseness between us. Questions like: "Do you chill white wine before you drink it?" And "why is some wine white and others red, when they are made from the same grape?" After each question, we would pause for a few seconds, as if to aerate the tannins of our own daftness, then let fly with: "What's the difference in taste between Shiraz and Syrah?" (They're the same thing, apparently)

There were moments when I was personally impressed with the apparent grasp of viticulture that belied one of our queries. This was delusion. Without fail, our hostess was visibly becoming more and more dismayed with the quality of each fresh probe. "Yes, merlot does actually improve over time," went one of her particularly downbeat responses.

In between these rounds of inane Q&A, she would leave us and go into her office for a few minutes, presumably to weep. None of us needed to go at the time, but I now wish we had asked her where the toilets were. That would at least have raised the average intellectual standard of the exchange.

Eventually, a thirty-something couple who appeared much more cultured and knowledgeable arrived, much to our hostess' joy, you suspect. We polished off our remaining samples as she split time between the two groups, then even bought a bottle of one of the wines we had tasted. It was mainly out of economic utility - you didn't have to pay the tasting fee if you bought something - but I like to think it was also a sort of apology for her having to suffer through our visit.