Gibbston Valley’s wine cave was blasted into the schist hillside in 1995 using 1.5 tonnes of explosives, the largest such cave in New Zealand and one of only two in the country. Founder Alan Brady planted the region’s first commercial vineyard here in 1983, and the cave now holds a library of every Gibbston Valley vintage since, alongside the Cheesery’s pairing flights with Whitestone cheeses from Oamaru.

Akarua was founded in 1996 by former four-term Dunedin mayor Sir Clifford Skeggs, who planted pinot noir and chardonnay on a north-facing Bannockburn terrace, the estate’s name meaning “two vines” in te reo. Next door, Carrick farms its 23.5 hectares organically and wild-ferments its wines, with a restaurant on the Bannockburn Inlet built around local game and produce. Both sit in what’s often called the holy grail of Bannockburn pinot country.

Mt Difficulty’s cellar door sits on a rocky outcrop above the winery, looking back across the Cromwell Basin to Lake Dunstan and the old gold-mining sluicings cut into the hillsides below. The winery was among the first to plant on the south bank of the Kawarau, and lunch on the terrace, weather permitting, takes in the same rugged rock-and-thyme landscape the wines are named for.

Bistro Gentil serves French cooking with a Central Otago accent, manuka-smoked olives, pressed Lumina lamb with kumara, in a dining room that looks straight out at the Southern Alps across Lake Wanaka. It’s the kind of small-town destination restaurant that punches well above Wanaka’s size.

Amisfield sits on a 200-acre vineyard at Lake Hayes, between Queenstown and Arrowtown, where the kitchen works from a network of local hunters, foragers and fishermen rather than a conventional supply chain. The closing dinner draws the trip’s themes together: native ingredients, a single piece of land, and the same Central Otago light that’s framed every cellar door along the way.