Snow, hard work again, honeymoon

Our last holiday until our honeymoon has just happened, and as most of you will already know from emails, Facebook and Twitter, it was an incredible four days spent at Mount Ruapehu, snowboarding, eating, drinking, snowboarding, and generally not being at work. This last bit was good, as it's been a fairly intense three months (only three months!!) and I was beginning to fear a little bit of burnout approaching.

So, for those of you who're not in New Zealand, Mount Ruapehu is an active volcano in the North Island, about four and a half hours' drive from Auckland on a good day. We were boarding at Turoa, and staying in Ohakune, about 20 minutes' drive down the hill and a genuinely lovely little town. The mountain's profile might be recognisable to some as Mount Doom from Lord of the Rings - it's more covered in snowboarders in real life.

To save a bit of time, we headed to Hamilton on Wednesday night, to stay with the Kiwi's sister and other half, which shortened the morning's drive by an hour or so and provided a great lasagne courtesy of the younger Kiwi. Stupidly early on Thursday we headed south, and some time after breakfast we could spot the mountain in the distance. We were on the hill by mid-morning, my initial nerves about having forgotten how to do it long gone by the end of the first run. That said, it was only December we were in Whistler.

Thursday was good - Friday was better. The snow was some of the best I've seen in all my three snowboarding trips; as good as Whistler at its best. They'd had 10cm on the Wednesday, and the perfect balance of clear, sunny days, cool temperatures and cold nights ensured it stayed deep and soft until we left. Saturday was good, but busy - obviously word had spread and the world and his dog had made the trip to the mountain. Sunday we managed a good breakfast before making an unhurried journey back home through stunning scenery.

Work, which we temporarily escaped, is intense. I can't speak for the Kiwi, although I know she's mentally busy, but for my part the pace and strain are fantastic. I've just convinced the business to hire another member of staff to support me, which should help, and with another project workstream about to kick off I'll need it, I think. Development is moving slowly even so, which is a bit of a concern as I'm burning through my credibility with every extra dollar I spend without showing a result. Hopefully I've built up enough of it to last another six weeks or so.

As for the last point - we have booked our honeymoon finally. Torn between heading from a southern hemisphere summer to the UK in February, and going to a beach not far from here, we chose the latter. We're going to Aitutaki, a tiny island north of Rarotonga, in the Cook Islands. Following a long time without any time off, and a wedding to boot, I think a week spent on a beach doing as close to nothing as possible will be just the thing.

Blending in

HOW good is this? I've been meaning to mention it for a while, only just got round to it. A friend of mine makes wine in Marlborough under his label Fiasco, and we've become friends, like many people he and I know, mainly through Twitter. He and his wife blog fairly enthusiastically too, and they both have a fair amount of highly intelligent stuff to say, not only on the subject of winemaking, which they live and breathe, but on the marketing and distribution of wine too.

Now, Aaron (for that is his name) is full of excellent ideas. They spend precisely $0.00 on marketing, and yet he's properly out there, and it seems to be working for him. The man has an innate understanding of social interaction online, and whilst his work in this space is defiantly non-commercial in content, what he's managed to do is something most marketers can only dream of - he's built a genuine dialogue with his customer based on a mutual understanding, and based on a very good product indeed.

Anyway, Fiasco's most recent ruse involved the blending of their 09 Sauvignon Blanc. Only being a small vineyard, Fiasco don't have the latitude of some larger concerns of being able to blend from multiple vineyard sites. In order to get a bit of complexity into the wine, Aaron's used three different yeast strains to deliver three distinct wines from the same grapes from the same vineyard, a not uncommon practice.

We've been following the fermentation for some time, as the wines develop their own characteristics and Aaron's been video blogging like a crazy person. Literally.

So the plan he came up with a while back involved getting his online acquaintances to sign up for a blending experiment. Some time after signing up, three bottles arrived in the post, labelled A, B and C. The instructions were simple: try a couple of different percentage blends, note down your favourite, and email the results back to Fiasco. The average across all the results they get back will be the final blend. A genuinely user-generated thing - brilliant.

So not only did we get the chance to experience the blending process first-hand (it was amazing to see how three wines mixed together produced something so much better than any of them individually), we had a hand in creating a Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc that will be on the shelves of our nearby wine merchants in a few months' time.

What a brilliant thing to do.