The next day, we drove southward along the foothills of the Ruahine and Tararua ranges after leaving Hawke's Bay. Our destination was the Wairarapa region, at the southern end of the North Island—specifically the village of Martinborough, a longtime farming town set on a scenic plain of prehistoric river gravel flanked by rolling pastureland and humped brown hills evocative of the drive from San Francisco to the Napa Valley. Martinborough is the heart of a thriving wine center with more than forty producers and growers, among them several makers of very fine pinot noir such as Ata Rangi and Kusuda and the cult favorite Dry River. The turn-of-the-century village—its memorial square in the middle of a street grid mapped after the design of the Union Jack—has a resident population of only 1,500, although the place can swell to ten times that number during its summertime wine festivals. Plenty of weekenders from Wellington make the ninety-minute switchbacked drive through the Tararua Range, but when we visited midweek, it seemed we had the place to ourselves, as if the main street and playgrounds and friendly local golf club were our own family reserve. Nobody minded my young daughters fitfully crisscrossing the fairways in the electric cart, nobody minded our testing the grass courts of the local tennis association, and I imagined this is how it was in Napa in the thirties and forties—an intimate, old-fashioned winemaking community that the world hadn't yet discovered.

I began to realize that an entirely different modality prevailed in this terroir, as was the case along the whole of our self-guided New Zealand wine trail, and I steadily felt myself re-gearing, perhaps moving no slower physically but at a more stately internal rpm. Maybe I didn't need to bungee jump or whitewater raft after all. Instead, I admired the invigorating details of my journey: inspecting the unusually high-trellised vines at Dry River with the exuberant young winemaker Kate "Poppy" Hammond; watching my seven-year-old, Eva, eyes shut, slurp down the last creamy, briny Clevedon oyster at our table in the venerable Peppers Martinborough Hotel; or simply parking roadside on the gentle hills on the outskirts of town, dusky tangerine light riding in on cooling breezes from the mountains and sea in the middle distance, tasting the scent of sweet grasses and river stone of this lovely, inverted world.

We flew to the South Island next, to explore the Central Otago region, the putative home of the country's finest pinot noirs. Ranging between the scenic Southern Alpine lakeside towns of Wanaka and Queenstown, Central Otago is set amid classic New Zealand terrain, the dramatic, oft snowcapped peaks of the Cairnmur, Pisa, and Horn mountains an unlikely backdrop for great wine country. Aside from the wine trail, we explored the iconic landscape. A hike in breathtaking Mount Aspiring National Park, where the Rees River was an electric, ice-pop blue (apparently from the mix of minerals that the rainwater leeches out as it flows down the mountains), was followed by a flight over the fjordlands and glaciers on the way to Milford Sound. There, our boat hugged the monumental cliffsides beneath the spray of hundred-foot waterfalls and passed platforms of flat rocks on which fat seals snoozed like oenophiles lolling after lunch on the vineyard lawns.