Good pinot noir is a treat - attractive, spicy, with bright fruit and a crisp, dryish finish. It's usually delicious by itself as well as being amenable with many types of food.
It seems a well-trodden path for ambitious young New Zealand chefs - head to Europe, work with a big-name chef in a 3-Michelin-star restaurant 16 hours a day for a couple of years, come back to head a fashionable cafe, then write a cookbook or column of trendy recipes, proclaiming your passion for food, fresh local produce, cooking for friends and how easy it all is.
The new vintage sauvignon blancs are creeping on to the market, but there's still a lot of 08s about, and some of it well worth drinking.
Riesling runs the gamut from lusciously sweet, through medium or off-dry fruity wines to dry wines with a backbone of steely acidity, which tend to develop more richness and charm with a few years bottle age.
One fine Sunday morning at Aramoana a couple of weeks ago it was fascinating to see how many varieties of food were being gathered from the sea at low tide.
It never ceases to amaze me how varied sauvignon blanc can be, from restrained, minerally styles to off-dry fruit bombs, from full-on, pungent, assertive wines, to smoky, textural ones made complex by barrel fermentation.
Pinot noir can be delicious, but it's not cheap.
With planting time looming and the prospect of lush harvests from the vegetable garden, Stephanie's Kitchen Garden Companion (Lantern, hbk, $140), the latest of Stephanie Alexander's comprehensive cookbooks, provides inspiration for both cooks and gardeners.
Church Road Winery in Hawkes Bay has introduced a new series of wine to celebrate its founder, Tom McDonald.
Having long played second fiddle to pinot noir and sauvignon blanc, New Zealand merlot and cabernet blends, especially from Hawkes Bay, are receiving acclaim overseas.
Many 2008 pinot noirs are making their way on to wine shop shelves, but a lot of them will benefit from at least several months of bottle age.
Chardonnay is often passed over in favour of more fashionable white varieties like sauvignon blanc and pinot gris.
Syrah, known in Australia as shiraz, and viognier originally come from the Rhone Valley in southern France and can be rich and mouthfilling.
Ossi di morto (bones of the dead) may not be the most enticing name for a biscuit, nor are these little macaroons pretty, but they are delicious.
Unusual varieties tend to languish in the pile of samples, mainly because they don't fit neatly into my regular varietal tastings. This line-up includes a couple of exciting arneis, a white variety originally from Piedmont in north west Italy that shows great potential here; some late-arriving roses; and an alternative to the ubiquitous sauvignon blanc.
When it comes to food porn, it's hard to beat chefs' cookbooks.
The Gasworks Museum is not just about amazing old steam engines smoothly pumping with just the faintest hiss.
There's a lot of chardonnay around, but it's a treat to find something that stands out from the crowd with complexity, texture and charm, as some of these wines do.
It's sometimes said we eat with our eyes, so the science festival's Dining in the Dark event at Technique restaurant at Otago Polytechnic last Friday was a challenging experience - not only in terms of eating without seeing, but also identifying some of the ingredients (the menu was written in Braille).
Many pinots are quite oaky which tends to manifest attractively as spice and dark chocolate when combined with ripe fruit.
