One of the reasons I love shopping for booze at Rumbles, downtown in Waring Taylor Street, is that it affords me the opportunity to visit my favourite bit of the city, Maginnity Street (right). Without fail, every time I turn the corner from Ballance Street, I'm suddenly overwhelmed with delightfully faux sense of history, grandeur, depth and scale. Only here, utterly surrounded with 10+ floor buildings at close range, do I find myself forgetting for just a moment that we're basically a piss-ant little city built around a trinity of longish streets laid out in the shape of a Mercedes Benz logo. Only here do I get the hopeful feeling that - just possibly - there may suddenly have sprung up thirty city blocks in every direction.It's not the architecture per se; the sequence on the right side of the street - the Wellesley Club, then the State (?) building, then the somewhat grandly named Petherick Tower - is nice, I guess, if a little disjointed*. It's more just the disorientation I experience when I suddenly cannot see any hills around me by which to navigate. It's a feeling I also experienced very strongly in Sydney, and have suddenly been overcome by at other odd moments like when walking down the main street of Onehunga, in Auckland.
So much deep thought, yesterday afternoon, as I wandered about in the bizarrely warm afternoon and dreamt of g'n'ts, and pondered on exactly how long it's been since I wrote anything of any worth on this blog. Busy-ness is only a partial excuse; I shall try harder, dear readers, do not be afeared.If you're looking for promises, that's about as good as you're gonna get.
In other news, it appears that I'm not the only person who absolutely cannot stomach oaked Chardonnay. Oaked anything, actually, including Merlot, which I'm not absolutely sure is oaked, but if it is it will explain why I can't really drink it. I don't get headaches, apart from the understandable ones (1.5 bottles of any wine will do that to ya, innit), it just makes me retch, pretty much. I've started telling people I'm allergic to it; entertainingly enough, most take me at my word.
Shout outs to the other Welly-bloggers who turned out last Friday night for the hooley. It was good to meet y'all, although I almost feel bad that I was so tired after a big week that no typical Drinks-After-Work-type behaviours were indulged in. That's my excuse, anyway. I'm not sure what The Sifter's excuse for the state he got himself into later in the evening is, though.
*As I'm no expert I'll leave it up to someone like Tom to verify the identify of the middle building; he might also like to comment on the respective architecture of the three buildings. About the best I can do is suggest the approximate era of each - 1900s, 30s, and 50s.
4 comments:
Stephen, you've made up for the delay with a dense and eclectic post, so: where to start?
On oaked wine: most reds have at least a little oak aging. It's only lighter and/or aromatic whites (riesling, sav, gewurz, pinot gris) that are typically unoaked. In fact, even sav was typically oaked in France, and it was a product of NZ turning our dairying expertise to wine that resulted in sav being fermented in giant chilled stainless-steel tanks, producing the crisp, light, fruit-driven styles that we're known for.
For a while, it was typical for chardonnay producers to go berserk with oak, even to the extent of chucking oak chips into the tank to speed up or fake the process. I agree that these became undrinkable, but these days most decent producers have a subtler balance. In fact, I'm probably quite the opposite, in that I find unoaked chards too one-dimensional, and the only sav that I really love is Cloudy Bay Te Koko, which gets malolactic fermentation as well considerable oak to produce a much weightier wine.
On Maginity St: yes, this is one of the few parts of Wellington that has a "lost in a big city" feel. It sometimes reminds me of the funny little Mayfair side streets just off Regent St, with grand Georgian buildings next to the back entrances of art deco and modernist ones. Maginity and Stout streets are often used for ads when they want to pretend they're in a metropolis.
You're not too far off on the building ages: you have to remember that we're at the end of the earth and architectural styles tended to reach us a decade or so too late. The Wellesley Club is from 1925; the bureaucratically-name Departmental Building (Number 31 on this heritage trail) is from 1940; and the underrated Petherick Tower is from 1962-65 (the only online info I can find is from the 8MB PDF of the Architecture Week brochure).
Oh, and how was the rest of the Cortina gig? Kim & I were knackered after a long day, so we left after about three or four songs.
Excuse? Er... how about the fact that you'd built up to Friday night with constant drinking throughout the week, whereas I (foolishly) approached it fresh.
That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it. At least I didn't hand-hive ;-)
I've always thought that was an odd area of town but hadn't really thought about why. Makes sense.
Maybe next time we won't all be quite so tired. Put it down to the silly season.
ah, so another engagement was the REAL reason you didn't turn up to my gig on friday night. can't help a dig at the old merlot either aye what? any chance you get - quite happy to drink a glass or two on the sly however. chardonnay - well catered for at gallery openings and ever so popular in auckland (although possibly not so much in onehunga).
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