While the North America struggles with unexpected snow storms and blizzards, New Zealand is soaking up the sun, dealing with the occasional heat wave, and enjoying wine festival season.

From the top of the North Island to the bottom of the South Island, foodies and winos wine enthusiasts can find events and festivals guaranteed to please the palate and the senses. But it not just about the wine. The festivals also offer entertainment, including fashion contests, kids games, and foot-tapping music.

Some events, such as the popular  Hawke’s Bay Wine and Food Festival and the Waiheke Island Wine Festival, have already had their moment in the sun for this year. But there is still plenty more to come.

Here’s just a small sampling of upcoming wine festivals around the country.

The Marlborough Wine Festival happens next weekend. It’s the most popular and longest running wine festival in New Zealand and tickets are usually sold out months in advance.  Located in the South Island town of Blenheim, the festival offers over 200 wines from 40 wineries, scrumptious locally grown and prepared food, and great entertainment.

The small historic maritime village of Devonport hosts the annual Devonport Wine and Food Festival (February 20-21), Featuring more than 15 of New Zealand’s top wineries and a  smorgasbord of mouth-watering foods. Located just minutes from central Auckland, Devonport is easily accessible by ferry or car.

At the beginning of March, the tiny town of Waipara in North Canterbury bursts at the seams as  visitors from around the country and the world gather for the  Waipara Wine & Food Celebration. 

Later in the month, the beginning of the grape harvest season is celebrated at the  Wairarapa Wines Harvest Festival (March 20). Now in it’s fourth year, this popular festival offers a chance to experience the great wines and foods from the surrounding Wairarapa region located approximately an hour north-east of Wellington.

Further down south in Central Otago, the 5th annual Gibbston Harvest Festival has been scheduled for the same day. Located at the Gibbston Valley Station, the festival features local wines and foods and offers master classes in wine tasting and food appreciation.

And on Easter Sunday, the historic goldrush town of Clyde in the deep south hosts the Clyde Wine & Food Harvest Festival. Featuring wines produced by the world’s most southerly vineyards, this festival offers a chance to taste some amazing wines, including the famed Central Otago Pinot Noir.

To discover even more wine festivals around the country check out Wines of NZ events guide.

Happy tasting!

(photo from Marlborough Wine Festival website)

Fans will be happy to discover that a new edition of the Perceptive Travel webzine in now online.

Returning writers Luke Armstrong, Michael Buckley, and Beebe Bahrami share their adventures from around the world.

Armchair travellers be warned – reading these articles will make you want to get up and go out into the world looking for similar adventures.

Luke Armstrong writes about Guatemala’s annual La Quema del Diablo festival when people burn symbolic papier–mâché devils in anticipation of the feast of the Immaculate Conception.

In most places, kayaking down a river would be a chance to commune with nature, but according to Michael Buckley, that’s not quite the case when the river you’re kayaking down is in Bangladesh. In Crowd-Surfing in Bangladesh, Michael discovers getting away from cellphones and finding personal space is impossible in poor but well-connected Bangladesh, especially when you’re paddling down the Teesta River.

Beebe Bahrami explains why visitors to Spain really should add historic Segovia to their itinerary. Once the headquarters for the bloody Inquisition, this easy to walk medieval village is steeped in history, complete with a Roman aqueduct and famous castle.

And rounding off this month’s issue of Perceptive Travel webzine is a diverse collection of travel book reviews to check out.

And don’t forget,  all Perceptive Travel newsletter subscriber’s (subscribe here) can enter the monthly contest giveaway.

This month’s prize is one of these cool messenger bag from OSPOP (One Small Point of Pride).

We’re all sad to say goodbye to Antonia Malchik, who is backing off from here to spend time giving birth to a second child and work on some less timely writing pursuits. We can’t argue with that. See her sign-off note here.

So that means we’ve got a spot open for a new blogger to join us. I’ve posted a special page on the website that gives a lowdown on what’s required of the position, what kind of person we are looking for, and what it pays. (Hint—the money is probably not the main reason you would want to do this…)

As a branch of the Perceptive Travel webzine, which regularly wins writing awards and gets into those “best travel writing” book anthologies, we want a real writer. This is not some blogging sweatshop throwing up banal content just meant to feed a big network owned by search engine marketers. So as you’ll see if you follow the link, you will need to prove you belong in the company of Sheila, Alison, and Liz—-and can fill Antonia’s shoes. (Though we wouldn’t mind a guy who wouldn’t be able to put on her shoes: it would be nice to have a smidgen of testosterone in the mix now and then.)

Interested in trying out? Go read the new blogger guidelines.

• 1. Lists are a common device in travel writing. I just browsed the travel magazines at Barnes and Noble, and among the many enumerated promises, I found 30 romantic dream trips, 7 delicious trips, 12 fun festivals around the world, 25 Ultimate Beaches, 10 Blissful Little French Islands, 30 Smart Tips and Tricks to Ski America.  And that’s not to mention the travel books that tell you all the things to see before you’re dead, and travel writing online, which is a hive of lists.
• 2.Travelers use lists a great deal. I make lists of things I want to see in a place, along with their addresses, which I keep it folded up in my pocket. Some people make packing lists. I have a master packing list that I keep in my jewelry box from a time when I traveled less often, but I never look at it anymore. Itineraries are a kind of a list.
• 3. Lists are not just found in travel writing, they are common in all kinds of “lifestyle” coverage — 50 Best Recipes to Pair with Food, Wine and Cocktails, 10 Easy Tips to Look Better Naked. Lists are less common in places that publish writing with more serious intent.
• 4. I find “top” destination lists annoying. They are marketing devices if you take them cynically and overly autocratic if you take them seriously — analogous to that person you meet at parties who says, “oh, you haven’t been to XYZ place? And you call yourself a traveler!” Which is further analogous to the people you meet who say, “oh you went to (China, say) recently? Too bad you didn’t go ten years ago, it’s not the real China anymore.” What nonsense. Any place you’re physically traveling to is by definition real and not imaginary. But that’s a digression, which isn’t really allowed on a list.
• 5. The US is the only advanced nation that does not mandate paid vacation time, one in four workers have no vacation time at all, among those that do, the average number of days off is 12. Therefore, international audiences with more guaranteed vacation time can probably make better use of long lists. No one will go to 50 beaches on their vacation, they want to know one beach to go to on their limited vacation time.  If properly described the magazine cover line would say: 49 beaches you won’t go to, but we’d like you to browse through them all to find the one you will.
• 6. A very long list (like, say, the 500 best hotels in the world) is too inclusive to be useful,  more like a catalogue than a list; while a shorter list is idiosyncratic and only useful if you understand the proclivities and prejudices of the list maker.
• 7. I don’t like it when people ask me to name my favorite destination. I don’t know how to answer this question; it’s impossibly broad. (Like the question, “how was your trip”, which wants an answer not longer than what you’d politely answer when asked “how are you?”, in other words summary bordering on dishonesty. )  I can group the places I’ve traveled to by certain characteristics: places I’ve found most relaxing, places I’ve found most stimulating. But every place I visit is tinged with my state of mind when I visited, it’s not a clean sample. It is not relaxing to be on a deserted beach when there are challenges going on at home. It is relaxing to be in the middle of a bustling city without a care in the world.
• 8. Lists are imperious, judgmental, absolute, aristocratic, anti-democratic and flattening. They allow no subtlety. I do not think that one city, or beach, or hotel is necessarily better than another, it depends on what you’re looking for.
• 9. The making of a list defines insiders and outsiders. This is why Social Register mattered a great deal for many years. But lists used to matter more, when printing was scarce and there were fewer of them. Now, anyone can make a list. Evidence of the death of the important list may have been the Facebook “25 Things About Me” meme.
• 10. I’ll allow that a list is a convenient way to organize information. I have written and published many lists and doubtless will continue to do so in the due course of my writing career.
• 11. Lists imply. They are meant to be a legend to something larger, something more. When you put oranges on a shopping list, you know the firmness of the orange that you prefer. You don’t need to write that on the list.
• 12. An outline is a kind of a list. A Table of Contents is a list.  A list on its own is a table of contents without further content.  A list is an opener without a closer. When people exhibit this sort of behavior, we call them a tease.
• 13. Lists are extremely popular online. Anyone with access to site metrics will confirm this. This is because lists are “scannable”, a fancy way of saying “skimmable”.  You are not meant to read a list. Rather, you let your eye  sweep over the page,  as across a shop window,  before you commit to reading a full sentence. Most likely you will not. “Elements that enhance scanning include headings, large type, bold text, highlighted text, bulleted lists, graphics, captions, topic sentences, and tables of contents.”
• 14. A list is a concession that information matters more than style.
• 15. Lists are more about graphic design than they are about writing.  Questions of page layout have been relevant since before the printing press. An illuminated letter in a medieval scroll made the page more scannable, you could say. A list with bold faced keywords makes use of only a few tools graphic design. (Emphasis, introduction of negative, or blank space.) There are many more. The popularity of the list online is related to writers functioning without the benefit of a designer creating a custom layout for each page.
• 16. An article that is solely a list is called a “listicle”.  This sounds more vulgar than “charticle” which is an article that consists of all graphics. I texted this fact to a friend who enjoys vulgar things. He wrote back suggesting that we call them “rocky mountain round-ups”. I thought this was funny and said I’d steal it. He wanted credit. Duly given: Andrew Collins, who once won a contest relating to the eating of a great quantity of Rocky Mountain oysters.
• 17. A list can mean to lean, in a boat. A list can mean to roll, in an airplane. A list can be a place to joust, if you are a Medieval knight.

In four months time I will be boarding the Dawn Princess in Sydney, Australia and sailing off into the sunset heading for Southampton, England. There are numerous port stops along the way in exotic and interesting places such as Darwin, Mumbi, Oman, Dubai, Egypt, Venice, Barcelona, etc but the majority of the fifty-five days will be at sea.

Which means there will be plenty of time for reading in between the eating, swimming, and sleeping.

My plan is to choose 10 travel books to take with me. So far, I’ve decided on these two …

A Tramp Abroad (Penguin Classics)

           by

  Mark Twain

Death on the Nile: A Hercule Poirot Mystery (Agatha Christie Collection)

by

Agatha Christie

But I still need eight more travel books to take.

Want to help? 

Leave a comment with your travel book reading recommendations