I’ll be honest: I’ve come for the wine. Marlborough has one of those reputations – for crisp sauvignon blancs, Cloudy Bay etc – that precedes it so thoroughly you think you know the place even before you’ve set foot in it. I had my ideal itinerary shaped in my head well before I arrived, a tidy narrative about a wine region doing what wine regions do, and pictured myself sipping something cold under a moody grey sky.
Marlborough, it turns out on arrival, has other plans. My first surprise is the sunshine. Marlborough, at the north-east of New Zealand’s South Island, is the country’s sunniest region, and while the sunshine is not the kind that makes you squint and reach for sunglasses, driving from the airport to the hotel it makes the autumn leaves glow a vivid amber and orange, each tree trying to outdo the other in beauty.
The Marlborough Boutique Hotel & Vineyard is housed in a beautifully restored former convent, with ceilings high enough to make you instinctively lower your voice and a bed so obscenely comfortable I conduct a serious internal debate about cancelling the rest of the trip and staying put.
I don’t, but I do spend my first morning lazily horizontal, pulling open the blinds just enough to stare out at the garden, where neat rows of vegetables and herbs supply the hotel’s one-hatted restaurant. The hotel has its own vineyard, producing merlot, malbec, riesling and sauvignon blanc, with wines thoughtfully curated to reflect both the estate and wider region.
Each evening I settle into what was once the convent chapel and is now the hotel bar (it feels like either a spiritual upgrade or a mild desecration, depending on your persuasion), and sip estate sauvignon blanc while eating canapes. There is something slightly absurd and completely wonderful about it.
Everywhere I go, the wine is extraordinary, but it is what Rich Ellis of The Marlborist winery tells me on day two that genuinely reframes the place. Marlborough isn’t one wine region, he explains – it’s three, stacked alongside each other, each with different soils, temperatures and personalities.
What keeps pulling me away from the wines is Marlborough Sounds – a maze of inlets with dense bush that drops straight to the shoreline.
The warm Wairau Valley, built on old gravelly riverbeds, produces the bold, tropical sauvignon blancs that made Marlborough famous. The Southern Valleys, where cold air rolls down from the Wither Hills at night, give you something cooler and more complex. The Awatere, further south and closest to the ocean, is windier, drier, mineral-edged – a different conversation in the glass.
Ellis sets up a portable chair on a hillside and hands me glasses to compare as he talks – a car-boot wine tasting with sweeping views that sounds eccentric but turns out to be one of the best hours of the trip. And at Cloudy Bay, there is a private tour, a tasting room, and a 2024 sauvignon blanc that renders further commentary unnecessary. I simply drink it and feel smug about being here.
What keeps pulling me away from the wines is Marlborough Sounds – a maze of inlets with dense bush that drops straight to the shoreline that don’t so much reveal themselves as quietly insist on your attention. I spend a morning on Grant Orchard’s boat Katabatic, a vessel he built himself and has guided through these waters his whole life.
Orchard is a trained chef as well as a skipper and free diver, and when I return to the boat from one of our stops, I find a spread of local cheeses from nearby producers and sourdough bread he’d baked that morning. Later, he dives overboard and surfaces with pāua – edible sea snails – which he prepares on the spot for lunch. I eat one of the best meals of my life with salt drying on my face and my curls doing something truly alarming. It’s bliss.
What stays with me are a series of moments: three wine glasses lined up on a hillside by a car boot (tip – to best enjoy the region, hire a private driver); a man in a wetsuit surfacing from the sea holding lunch; a chapel devoted to quiet devotion for a century, where malbec is now poured at sunset.
Marlborough accumulates within you like this, first quietly and then completely, until leaving feels like a decision you didn’t quite make.
I came for the wine. But I should have known a place this generous was never going to stop there.
The writer was a guest of The Marlborough Boutique Hotel & Vineyard and Destination Marlborough.
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