But to be honest, I associate New Zealand mostly with wine: I'm a bit too enamored of all things vin, an honest glass of elegant red wine being one of my primary vices and a likely cause of any future penury and self-dissolution. It's how I travel each night at dinnertime, exploring far-flung regions like Mendoza, in Argentina, and Paarl, in South Africa, places I've not yet been. They're part of a long and delicious list, and right near the top were some of the wine regions of New Zealand. Whether or not this is an ideal way to introduce oneself to a country is debatable, but I'm certainly not the first to believe that you can learn something about a place from its serendipitous matrix of geography and climate and soils, the particular expressions of viticulture being as telling of locale as any fields of wild resident flora. Wine people refer to this as gout de terroir, the idea that you can taste something of a patch of land in the glass—a certain mineral quality, say, the influence of schist or ancient river rock on the maturing fruit. Like evolution, it's more a theory than a provable tenet, but it's one that makes good sense to me, if more as an artistic and philosophical proposition than a scientific—and even enological—one.

The country has ten major wine regions, which collectively span a thousand miles, from the Northland vineyards on the North Island to the Central Otago region on the South. There are more than five hundred wineries in the country, many quite new—there were just half that number a decade ago—and the geographic range allows them to cultivate a rich diversity of red wine grapes: The North Island vineyards produce warmer-climate varietals like cabernet sauvignon and merlot, and the cooler-climate Central Otago winemakers focus on pinot noir.

With this in mind, I chose four distinctly different areas, in terms of terrain, with excellent red wine producers—including Waiheke Island (in the Auckland region), Hawke's Bay, Martinborough (in the Wellington region), and finally Central Otago. On this route, the landscape would shift dramatically from island to seaside to valley floor to river basin. What makes this viticultural diversity possible is twofold: Common to all the wine regions is the tempering maritime climate, which makes for a long, steady period of fruit ripening (warm summer daytime temperatures are quickly cooled by sea breezes at night), and the latitudinal range, which runs from the Southern Hemisphere equivalent of Bordeaux to southern Spain.

We began on Waiheke Island, a verdant jewel of volcanic land risen from the seas of the Hauraki Gulf, and a thirty-five-minute ferry ride from Auckland. I had chosen Waiheke for its boutique winemakers, but if the island produced only soybeans or sod I would have wished to stay just as long. As we approached Waiheke on the boat, the morning clouds that hung over the city dissipated, the skies opening up with a shimmering, yawning light, and I actually wondered whether it was a pity to have begun a trip in a new country with such immediately transporting vistas. For how could we possibly go on from here? At less than thirty-six square miles, Waiheke is about three-quarters the size of Nantucket, although its jagged, puzzle piece–shaped coastline holds nearly a hundred beaches, each of them tucked into bays majestically framed by rolling hillsides marked at the shoreline by pohutukawa trees, which were just then flowering in a gaudy crimson bloom. Imagine what would seem an impossible combination of the quaint islands of Seattle and the Lake District of western England, with the tropical feel and climate of the Côte d'Azur, and then splice in manicured vineyards and great swaths of pastureland ranged by puffy, limpid sheep, and you'd have Waiheke.