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Photo: Amber Share

I’m hunkered over the wheel of my rental car, and I’m anxiously navigating a windy coastal road north of Auckland, on New Zealand’s North Island. It’s pouring and I have no idea where I am, although wherever I am it’s awfully pretty. I drive through fog-shrouded valleys and verdant hills where sheep, clotted in lumpy white mounds, stare at me as I pass. Still no trace of Matakana, the village where I’ve been invited for a vineyard stay. Suddenly I’m over the hills, the sun comes out and there’s a rainbow with one end arching over a tiny white church with a red roof. Two minutes later, I spot a wooden sign that says Welcome to Matakana. It seems I’ve arrived.

Photo: Amber Share

The farmers’ market sells everything from “organic & G.E-free feijoa juice” to coffee beans slow-roasted in small batches and artisanal ales and lagers.

I make my way to Takatu Vineyard & Lodge, owned by my friends Heather and John Forsman. They’ve been imploring me for the past two years to come see the unlikely transformation of a disappearing town into what could be described as New Zealand’s answer to the Hamptons. Heather, who runs the four-bedroom lodge in the middle of their acclaimed boutique winery, calms my frazzled nerves by pouring me a glass of John’s bone-dry pinot gris. I’m enjoying the wine so much I barely pay attention to her CliffsNotes version of Matakana’s history, but I do get something about cows and dairies and butter and a slowly dying rural community.

Photo: Ben Crawford

“If you’d got lost coming this way even 15 years ago, there would have been the Anglican church and a pub with a couple of farmers in it slowly sipping their beer because they could only afford to have one,” she says, topping up my glass. “But now, everything’s changed. Matakana has become this vibrant mix of visionaries and artists and all the little business people in between, like us. And somehow we all get along.” She takes a sip and says, “You know what? You need to meet Christine and Richard.”

At the Brick Bay Sculpture Trail, winetastings are held in the glass house. (Photo: Mark Smith)

Richard Didsbury, an Auckland property investor, greets me at the Matakana Village Farmers’ Market he founded (Heather calls it “the heart and soul of our whole greenie-foodie-artist thing”). It’s just after 8 a.m. and already the former sawmill site is packed; on busy summer weekends, it draws some 5,000 day trippers, or six times the town’s population. As we wend our way past stalls hawking gorgonzola and fresh mozzarella balls, bush honey, duck eggs and farmed oysters, Richard tells me he and Christine bought several parcels of land in and around Matakana in the early 1990s. They wanted a retreat from urban life, but soon found they were spending more time here. Attracted by the local history, strong sense of community and nascent wine industry, they began thinking about the town’s potential. They purchased a 160-acre farm and planted the first vineyards of Brick Bay Wines in 1995; their premiere vintage of pinot gris was a gold-medal winner at Auckland’s Royal Easter Show in 1998.

Photo: Amber Share

Laid out like a wheel, the Matakana farmers’ market has forty-odd vendors, including Lothlorien, with its “famous organic & G.E.-free feijoa juice”; the coffee guy, whose beans are “slow-roasted in small batches”; the beer folks, who make artisanal ales and lagers “canned by hand!”; and, my favourite, the Lemon Tart Lady with her luscious pastries sold out of recycled egg cartons. “It’s a little quirky,” says Richard, sampling a handmade sweet fennel sausage, “but it’s given Matakana an identity. Once the market was established, everything else took off in an organic fashion.”

Matakana has changed from a slowly dying rural community to a vibrant place of visionaries, artists and business people.

The following morning, after downing the bowl of homemade muesli Heather has delivered to my room, I wander around the village and the surrounding countryside. I get my sweet fix at Blue, an ice cream and smoothie bar specializing in blueberry concoctions made from local Omaha blueberries, and my art fix at The Cream of Matakana, an eclectic gallery and design store in a building that housed the Matakana Co-op Dairy for over 60 years. In the afternoon I drive along two-lane country roads, past farms that seem equally divided between sheep and grapes, to the Brick Bay Sculpture Trail. Another Didsbury project, it combines wine tasting with a two-kilometre walk through an open-air museum in woods and meadows.

Sculptures by the country’s leading artists can be viewed along a forest path. (Photo: Mark Smith)

When I arrive, Anna Didsbury, Richard and Christine’s daughter and the site manager for the trail, is cleaning up in preparation for closing. I tell her I’ve come to see the contemporary art and taste her father’s wine, and she agrees to stay open. I walk over a squeaky wooden bridge; from below come the eerie, recorded voices of children. In a lush green field, a two-metre-high Easter egg made of vine cuttings sits whimsically on its rounded bottom. There are pastel glass lilies atop long chrome stems in the middle of a real lily pond, and bronze otters, dressed in their Sunday best, standing on hind legs on a pier with their luggage as if waiting for a boat to come pick them up. It’s all very odd, in an Alice in Wonderland sort of way. And, like Alice, I feel a little bit lost. It doesn’t matter. By the time I make it back to the reception centre, Anna is waiting for me with a glass of Brick Bay Pharos, an elegant Bordeaux-style red, and a plate of local cheeses and fruit. It’s giving me – like it did the little town of Matakana itself – a new lease on life.