Day 49, in which we drink ten wines and cycle fifteen kilometres

After a fabulous breakfast at the Alpine Lodge's café – whose poached eggs and muesli with cinnamon poached fruit was more than a match for their restaurant – we drove up to Renwick on the east coast, one of the main settlements within the Marlborough wine growing region. The drive was a rather tense affair, as gas stations are few and far between in the mountains and the fuel gauge was nudging red by the time we limped into town.

After checking into the Watson's Way Backpackers hostel – where the very lovely owners Pat and Paul welcomed us with fresh cut flowers and two hire bikes – we threw ourselves immediately into the focus of this afternoon: Marlborough wine tasting.

What a brilliant business idea: tourists turn up, you feed them free wine and then they cycle off to scrounge more booze off the neighbours. There are forty-six different vineyards within easy reach of Renwick, and since we didn't really have the time or constitution to visit them all we set out on a simple 15km loop from the hostel.

First stop was the Wairau River winery, a pretty huge operation. We sampled the 2009 Sauvignon and then compared it to the previous year's, of which 10% had been aged in oak. Comparing wines turns out to be the best way to appreciate them. For example, I didn't realise that storing wine in oak mellowed and rounded out the flavours so nicely, nor that twelve months is a long time in Sauvignon years and much of the citrus flavour was already in decline, allowing the nettle and pepper flavours to stand out. Alas, despite a superb sticky pork and peanut salad in Wairau River's sunny garden, the wine server didn't have much enthusiasm for her topic or interest in her customers. We didn't feel especially welcome, so after just two wines we reboarded our bikes and figured we'd probably never go out of our way to taste Wairau River wine again.

Our next stop, the Huia winery, was a much smaller and more friendly place, with an enthusiastic wine server who had an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of wines, the wine making process and the growing of grapes. Indeed, it didn't take Paul long to start picking her brains on the trademark and regulatory issues faced by the company when exporting globally. We tasted four delicious wines here: an unusual sparking Chardonnay (2004 Huia Blanc de Blancs), which I thought tasted just a little too much like Chardonnay; Sauvignon blends from 2008 and 2009, of which I disapproved of the more recent for its indulgence in mystic woo-woo (the Huia winery is, alas, converting to 'biodynamic farming' – or witchcraft – which is not something I generally support); and then a surprisingly tart Riesling, with a strong mineral aftertaste. All were excellent and the server had us laughing throughout, so we will probably keep our eyes out for Huia in the UK.

I feared that our next stop – the Cloudy Bay winery – would be overly corporate and formal, as it is the only of the Renwick vineyards to be a household name in the UK. As it turned out, it was a very relaxed affair, with a big basket of bats, ball and other toys for playing in the garden. We tasted five separate wines here all of which were excellent (even the German wines!) and their Riesling pudding wine was one of the nicest I've ever tasted, being much less syrupy than a typical Muscat and also lighter at only 10%. I will definitely seek that out in the UK as a refreshing way to finish a meal.

We wanted to visit a few more vineyards (including the Oyster Bay winery), but it seems they have chosen not to market in the same way as their competitors and, after ten wines and cycling fifteen kilometres through the baking heat, we felt perhaps we'd already had sufficient anyway. Still, we had a superb afternoon, and today's alcocycle is a welcome addition to the dozen or so other experiences in our current Top Ten of the holiday.

For dinner we headed out to the local English pub – the Cork and Keg – where we indulged in nostalgia with a pint of bitter and a pub meal (hotpot and Yorkshire pudding, no less). We returned to the hostel and found we can still only get two channels on the tv in the bedroom, so we watched a series of dross while winding down, including a documentary about a savage pensioner killer from North Island (where we go next week) and an awful US TV show called Canterbury's Way about a vile lawyer.