The gorge that Queenstown Wine Tour Private tours now follow was, in 1864, a goldfield. A French miner named Jean Désiré Feraud had already turned from alluvial claims to cuttings, planting Central Otago's first commercial vines on the terraces at Clyde. By 1881 his wines were winning medals in Sydney. Feraud sold up, moved north, and the vineyards reverted to fruit trees and rabbit country. Nearly a century passed before anyone tried again. Romeo Bragato, the government viticulturist, reported in 1895 that the district was eminently suited to the grape; the finding sat unused for eighty years. Rolfe and Lois Mills planted at Rippon, above Lake Wanaka, in 1974. Alan Brady put pinot noir into the schist terraces of Gibbston in 1981, on ground most locals held to be too cold to ripen anything. Verdun Burgess and Sue Edwards followed at Black Ridge, near Alexandra. Gibbston Valley Wines was established on Brady's block in 1990. Those few hectares became the foundation of the Central Otago winery tours that run through Queenstown's wine country today. The region lies near the 45th parallel south, the southernmost commercial wine district in the world by most reckonings. Its climate is continental rather than maritime: hot dry summers, hard winters, and a daily temperature swing of twenty degrees or more that slows sugar while acid holds. Pinot noir accounts for roughly three-quarters of all plantings. Riesling, pinot gris and chardonnay take most of the rest. Aspect and altitude matter more here than latitude. Frost fans stand above the rows like harbour cranes, and in a bad October they run all night. Gibbston is the coolest sub-region, strung along the Kawarau Gorge at elevations between 320 and 420 metres, where north-facing slopes of weathered schist take what warmth the valley allows. Harvest arrives here last, often deep into April. In 1995 a cellar was blasted seventy-six metres into the rock face, still the largest wine cave in the country, its barrels held at steady temperature by the schist itself. The cellar doors along State Highway 6 — the spine of most Gibbston Valley wine tours — remain working buildings, with crush pads, tanks, a tasting bench and a dog. Queenstown Wine Tour Private tickets open an agricultural landscape rather than a monument: vines pruned by hand each winter, a green river below, and mountains that were never supposed to grow wine.