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National Geographic : 1974 Aug
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awful experience, they created what Jock Stevenson calls the "spirit of Napier." "On earthquake day," he said, "everyone was on one level-the rich man was one with the dustman. Napier learned that all the money in the world won't buy you a single pannikin of fresh water-but that human beings, when they set out to help each other, can accomplish anything. That's an idea worth keeping alive." There are some North Island experiences At one with the land, a tot samples both soil and harvest at Te Mata Vineyards near Havelock North. More than 90 percent of New Zealand's 320 commercial vineyards thrive in the North Island. A tree-threaded carpet, lush fare for dairy cattle, spreads over the volcanic effluent of Mount Egmont (facing page). less dramatic than an earthquake but just as good for the soul. Among these I include drinking the island's white wines. More than five million gallons of table wines, port, and sherry are produced in the North Island in an average year. When I think about wine mak ing, I think romantically of cobwebs and cool cellars and candlelight picking up the color in a glass of claret. Therefore I visited not the biggest but one of the oldest vineyards-Te Mata, 26 acres of vines on a sunny hillside, three modest buildings with stone cellars filled with stacks of oak barrels in which body and bouquet were being born. A young Cornishman, David Smale, oper ates Te Mata Vineyards with his father, Wil liam. Some of their vines, planted in crooked green rows like the signature of civilization, are nearly a hundred years old. David Smale and his youthful wine maker, Colin Reay, are justly proud of the dry white wine they ferment from Pinot Gris grapes and positively boastful of two dry red wines, one made from Pinot Meunier grapes and the other from Cabernet. "If we take the time," Reay asserted, "we can do as well here as anyone in the world. And sometimes we do-taste this!" He hand ed me a glass of nutty-flavored port, and I had to agree he had a point. From the Sublime to the Sulphurous The fragrance of Te Mata's wines was soon driven from my nostrils by a more character istic North Island odor-the sulphurous breath of the earth's steamy bowels. From the vineyard I drove northwest to the center of the island. There lies Rotorua, most fa mous of North Island resorts, on the shores of a shallow blue lake. The soil of Rotorua is alive not with crops but with spitting vol canic mud, seams of raw sulphur, boiling pools of acid water, vents of steam. The best way to see the tumultuous earth around Rotorua is from an airplane, and I was taken aloft by Capt. Fred Ladd, a veteran pilot who moves a little stiffly as a result of landings he has walked away from. It was a brilliant day. Below us grass lay like a velvet coverlet over the humped bodies of sleeping volcanoes. "Looks like somebody's been smoking in bed," said Fred when I tried out this poetic phrase on him. He steered the plane to a chasm 700 feet deep on Mount Tarawera, glided by the steaming cliffs that tower on the shores of National Geographic,August 1974 206
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