Sue had done a very thorough job of plotting the route with as many wine references as possible. Who would have thought there were so many streets named after wine types, grapes or early vintners? The historical references to vineyards which have long disappeared under housing and factories accented just how much Auckland has spread since our MG was young.

By the time we parked at Kerr Farm Vineyard the sun was out, jazz was playing on the club sound system and there looked no better way of spending a Sunday afternoon than having a picnic in a vineyard. The cars, ancient (J2) and modern, were all parked with the vines for a backdrop and looked very impressive as usual.

The vineyard consists of 23 acres and is owned by Jaison and Wendy Kerr; Jaison took us through the tasting of the five wines that they produce and told us something of the history of the place that they bought in 1989. After the very enjoyable tasting we settled down in the shade to enjoy our picnic with a very "chic and sassy chardonnay" (tasting notes). Jaison is a very versatile vintner and also produces pizzas in his wood fired oven, apparently to get best results it had to be pre-warmed the day before and fired up at 7.00am.

We were all feeling very relaxed by now but Sue wasn’t going to let us just blob out and organised some gentle exercise in the form of a gumboot tossing competition followed by a game of water balloon catch. Congratulations to Ross and Judy Hindman for winning the balloon game. Runners up were Warren Durling and Colleen East. In the gumboot challenge three people landed the boot on the MG target. Congratulations to Gordon Luke for winning the toss off; Helen Hartwell came in second and Peter Crawford was third.

Thanks to Sue and Neil for organising another successful vineyard run and even with the number of defunct vineyards in Henderson I know Sue will continue to find interesting venues for future runs.