Six hours later, we wended our way through the Maungaharuru Range, gently descending to sea level as we approached Hawke's Bay and its seaside town of Napier, an Art Deco settlement that was almost completely destroyed in an earthquake and resulting fire in 1931, and was in fact slightly shaken while we were there by a temblor registering 6.8 on the Richter scale. This is classic maritime vineyard land, what you'd see around the dusty town of Bordeaux—pan-flat blocks of vines baking under a strong summer sun, the calm bay waters lapping at the sandy, crescent shore—although here, at the southern end of the bay, the terrain rises in a dramatic reach of land called Cape Kidnappers, whose ridged granite walls plunge sheerly five hundred feet to the sea. There are a few vineyards on the cape, and then dozens more farther inland in the Ngaruroro River Basin and around the Te Mata and Craggy ranges that border the prosperous wine village of Havelock North. We visited several fine ones, including Clearview and Craggy Range, but my other charge in coming here was to play the golf links atop Cape Kidnappers, surely one of the most picturesque courses in the world.

Golfing and drinking great wine are surprisingly aligned pursuits, in my view, for along with a thousand other things (hubris, irony, farce, etc.), golf is essentially an object lesson in the happy accident, how sometimes wind and turf and steel and hand magically fuse in what feels to me like a lyric rush, a delicious, perfectly pitched verse, though primordial, elemental, a tone way down low. Whether in parkland or by the seaside or in the hills, you give yourself over to the particular sweep of the land, the scent of sod incorruptible, the sky beaming upon your meager efforts, all of it a righteous improvisation, a sweet, sublime riff. The sensation can be glorious enough if you're playing at some weed-choked municipal course, but at Cape Kidnappers that feeling gets trebled to an epic scale: Here, the pure momentary connection to place trumps even dreams of mastery. The course is laid out on the cape's high ridges that reach out like huge fingers to the sea, the deep ravines between them darkly wooded and foreboding, and after I brutally hacked my way across the stunning layout, my kind caddie lent me some much-needed lightening of mood by teeing up a ball for me beside the fifteenth green, telling me to drive one high and straight into the Pacific Ocean; I made my best swing of the round, and we counted a full twelve seconds before the splash broke the water far below, perhaps the most pleasing out-of-bounder I've ever hit. I like to think there's a cousin feeling you experience after taking a sip of a complex wine—how the mystery and majesty that come from soil and mineral and fruit somehow orchestrate as one. After the round, I sipped pinot noir at dusk at the Craggy Range vineyard in the darkening umbra of its stunning namesake, an immense jagged rock that frames the sky above the vine rows. I could feel how the fruit was cooling on the vine, its maturation tempered and slowed, taking on the layered weight and texture that I was sure I could taste in the wine. You can glean a lot from drinking a wine at home, but it's a wholly different encounter tasting it in its place of origin—not just for the discrete palatal or intellectual stimulation of particular flavors but for an ineffable and fleeting moment that you'll never quite have again. The light fades, the stony fragrance of the river dissipates, the window closes, and all is gone.