Kaikoura

I spent my first whole weekend off since before harvest started bye going to a small beach town just 2 hours south of Blenheim.  The town is called Kaikoura; in Maori Kai means "food" and Koura means "crayfish".  The crayfish or as we know it, rock lobster is quite a popular dish here and Kaikoura is known throughout New Zealand as the destination for crayfish.


    

My friends and I picked a great weekend to visit, it was sunny skies and 52 F and the ocean was very calm and made it a perfect day to swim with wild dolphins! 

 There is one company that takes people out on the ocean to swim with the dolphins, the water was quite cold but they put us all in wet-suits and took us out in search of the dolphins.

 

Along the way we were able to see quite a few albatross.  Our skipper told us that these birds are quite heavy and need the help of wind in order to fly, this particular day- there was no wind.  It was amazing to see them as they were flying and trying to take off.        

Once the skipper found a pod of dolphins we jumped in the 15 C water and we were able to swim with them.  There were hundreds of Dusky Dolphins for us to swim  with, and a whole pod swam right though our snorkeling group. 

 

 

After we swam with the dolphins we were told we were swimming in depths of 500 meters! After swimming with the dolphins, on our way back to the docks our skipper found 2 humpback whales, the first ones for the season.  This was quite a treat, as this company has different charter boats to view whales, albatross and dolphins, so we lucked out and got the best tour of all!

 

Back on shore, we went to the seal colony and found some seals relaxing in the sunset.

This was the view of the sunset from Kaikoura, a great ending to an adventurous day!

                                       

Here is what the crayfish look like and they were delicious!!

Before.......

........After

Overall it was a great weekend for swimming with dolphins, whale and albatross watching eating crayfish and spending time with the friends that have become more like family to me since being abroad.  I look forward to sharing more pictures with everyone! Thanks for reading :)

Indevin Winery

As vintage comes to a close, our hours have been reduced from 12hr shifts to 8hrs.  This has allowed me to finally update my blog!  The vintage went smoothly and I learned so much valuable information and have meet some great friends from all over the world.  Indevin crushed a total of 29,500 tonnes of grapes for the 2011 harvest! 

Here are some pictures from the winery.  

This is a continuous flotation machine, the juice comes straight from the presses and nitrogen is pumped into it and this makes the lees float to the top where it is scrapped off sent off to another location in the winery.  After a few hours in the flotation the juice from the bottom is pumped into the tanks, this flotation can fill a 240,000 liter tank.

This is our common break room.  This is where we enjoyed our break time, socialized and ate lunch together.

 

We also got either beer (on tap) or wine after each of our shifts and we could relax on the couches or play darts or pool.

This was known as the "West Presses" where we would receive grapes and press them before the juice was sent off to tanks or the flotation devices.

These presses were known as the "East Presses"

These machines were used for filtering out the lees and solids and were part of the RDV (Rotary Drum Vaccum filter) section of the winery, the machines were located throughout the winery.









Now that vintage is over, most of the people I've meet are leaving and will travel for a few months before returning to their homes or other countries preparing for the upcoming vintages.  Indevin extended some contracts to people in the cellar through July, including to Monica so we will continue to live together and we hope to explore the Blenheim area a little more now the we will have some more free time. I hope to upload some more pictures of the area and winery in the future.  Thank you all for reading and I hope everyone is doing well!

Indevin Lab

Here is some pictures of  the lab equipment we use at Indevin on a daily basis:

We use this machine to measure the pH and TA (Total Acidity) of the wine samples.  

This machine is used for measuring the alcohol content of the samples.

This machine is called FOSS, this wine scanning machine performs most of the tests that we do in the lab, Brix, pH, TA, RS (residual sugar), VA, etc.  It is a great way to double check the results that we get by hand and it is very easy to use.

We use this machine to check the pH and TA through Auto-Titration. 

This hand-held device is called an Anton Paar Density Meter, we use this to measure the Brix on the samples.

This is where we preform the sulfur tests, both Free Sulfur and Total Sulfur.

 

This measures the Turbidity of the wine, the test preformed is called an NTU.  This measures how clear or cloudy the wine is and gives a result from 1-1000.

 

This is where the cell counts are done.  A sample is taken after yeast is added to the wine and we count both the live and dead yeast cells.  We use methylene blue staining method to distinguish between the live and dead cells.