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Duration: 6 Hours

Location: Queenstown, NZ

Price: $189NZD pp

Keep reading to find out my experience with Altitude Wine Tours Queenstown! Okay, it’s official I have the travel bug again…. But I’m not mad about it.

New Zealand is a super diverse and culturally rich land to explore, I have now made it my mission to keep exploring this gorgeous country I call home. At the beginning of this month, I decided that it was time to start up the travel engines again. After booking a trip to Queenstown for a week I could not be more stoked!

For those of you who don’t know, Queenstown is a beautiful town located in New Zealand’s south island in the region of Otago. Surrounded by gorgeous snowy mountains that are perfect for skiing all day long and also hundreds of thousands of grapevines for wine production. It really is the perfect escape from busy life.

Although the town itself is usually busy all year round, I found it was relatively quiet this year. I guess there isn’t really as much travel as there usually would be. In fact, the quietness was peaceful and worked well for me and my Instagram hopes and dreams to get “people-less” pictures! I will be bringing out a comprehensive guide to my Queenstown experience soon so make sure to let me know if you are interested in reading it! (But do check out my South Island Road Trip Guide in the meantime or my North Island Road Trip Guide!)

Having been to Queenstown on multiple occasions prior to this, I could not wait to finally get my hands back on some of the beautifully made wines of the region. Known as one of the best Pinot regions in the world, my inner wine connoisseur was living for it.

I was lucky enough to work with Altitude Tours, I want to take a quick second to recognize their beautiful hospitality and efforts to make my experience as fantastic as possible! Now, choosing a wine tour can be tricky. Most people think that they can just drive to and from each winery as they please but, you want to get that full Otago experience right? Plus, I DO NOT encourage drinking and driving, a strict rule here in NZ…. You’ll find that Altitude Tours is much more than a simple Queenstown Wine Hop on Hop off tour or your run-of-the-mill Bike Wine Tour – Altitude has that personal care flare that we all know we love!

Starting the day

Each winery is relatively close together, but they are rurally located, not really within walking difference so I highly recommend booking a tour to get the full experience. Altitude tours sounded like the perfect company to work with to take in the local wine culture. The schedule was jam-packed with 4 different wineries and to visit within the space of around 6 hours. Now, this might sound like a lot of time, but I can confirm, when you add up the driving, walking, and personal exploration (plus a little bit of wine in your system) the day zooms by!

We were picked up from our hotel in Queenstown the Sherwood. Altitude Tours comes to you rather than you to them! We were located around 5 minutes out from Queenstown Airport and this was no problem for them at all! Altitude Tours is the perfect level of luxury I desire. How good is it to not have to worry about driving around to find a specific meeting spot?! Plus, a lovely silver Mercedes Van prompted the ride to be of ultimate comfort. Check out this video of our hotel meeting point, this was a bus stop, can anyone find a bus stop with better views?

As the Mercedes van pulled up we were greeted by our lovely tour guide Alia. I must admit, for 10 am, her energy and enthusiasm about the day ahead really did get me excited to start drinking wine this early in the day. As we boarded the van there were 6 other individuals (3 other couples) also taking part in the wine tour. This group dynamic was fantastic and it was great to be able to share this experience with some other wine enthusiasts.

First things first, we signed into an iPad that was handed around the passengers (sanitizer included – a good move I say), the sign-in process consisted of entering our name, emails, and ages. It is super important that we are being legal here. Now, remember, the legal drinking age in NZ is 18, so we are so far passing with flying colours.

After signing in, Alia passed back some menus, we all know the importance of a good “carbo-load” while drinking. Drink responsibly! We were going to be having lunch at midday at our second winery of the day which was going to be Kinross. I selected a chicken dish, while Sam went for something meaty and hearty! On the menu, you could also choose from Pizzas, other mains and of course lots of side dishes. After briefly looking at the menu, Alia mentioned a beautiful saying we all connote with the feeling of euphoria – “free wifi”. So far, so FANTASTIC! Not only free wifi but to further exercise the notion of drinking responsibly, we all had access to free bottled water!

Arrowtown

We were told that we had some time before we had to be at the first winery, so Alia mentioned a cheese tasting. It was fair to say we all unanimously decided that would be fantastic. So we headed off in the direction of Arrowtown – a historic old mining town in Central Otago! We were taken by some sights on the way such as Lake Hayes, the Shotover River, and the iconic Arrowtown main street. Talk about New Zealand’s version of main street Disneyland….!

We popped into Gibbston Valley Cheese where we got to sample some of their finest creations. One of my favorites was the red wine-infused cheese (shown below), guess what it tasted like….! After pottering around the store and learning a bit about cheesemaking we hopped back into the van and headed for Gibbston Valley Winery.

The Wineries

As I mentioned above; each winery is relatively close together, but they are rurally located, not really within walking difference so I highly recommend booking a tour to get the full experience. Altitude tours sounded like the perfect company to work with to take in the local wine culture.

Gibbston Valley Winery

Gibbston Valley Winery is one of the prettiest and most iconic wineries in the region greeted us with open arms. We had arrived to be part of not only cellar door tastings but also a fantastic tour of the property. We had a lovely guide from the winery who was able to take us to their very own vines and the wine history of the region. One thing that I wasn’t expecting from the winery guide was the wealth of knowledge that she was able to produce. Here are some awesome facts that I learned:

Otago is perfectly situated in the world for producing amazing Pinot and this is because it is exactly 45 degrees south of the equator. Other amazing pinot-producing regions also include France, Italy, and parts of the USA. Below is an image of the “pinot belt”
The vines that we saw were planted back in 1983, they seem to still be going strong!
Wine requires highly controlled temperatures, therefore why Otago climate is perfect
Altitude and soil type affects the growth and taste of the grapes!

Next, we were guided to the well-known Gibbston Valley Wine Cave! Literally escorting us through the mountain overtop of us, we learned that the original owner actually used dynamite to create the cave! Turns out that the manual labor of using a pickaxe took too long! It was here that we got to take part in our very first tasting! Now I won’t spoil the wines we got to try but our guide certainly had a very heavy pouring hand! – So pace yourself!

Following the tasting, we had a bit more time to look around before departing for our next winery!

Altitude Tours Queenstown