The first few categories and the subsequent wines are easy to keep up with but, as the night rolls on, there's less and less elbow room as bottles encroach on the table space.
Categories come and go, the pace doesn't let up, the quaffing's relentless and eventually hard to maintain. For fear of missing out on the next wine, guests take a quick sip then turf the remainder onto the Waikoko Gardens' lawn - Hawke's Bay hedonism.
Next morning, the chairman of judge's words rang in my ears as I, too, was seeing the effects of two great vintages in a row.
He had the line of the night when he reminded everyone that great vintages don't create great wines - people do. A timely reminder that wine doesn't make itself.
When Esk Valley Winemakers Reserve Hawke's Bay Chardonnay 2014 was announced the best in show, it dawned that this was the third consecutive year a chardonnay had trumped our celebrated reds for top prize.
For years this region has copped it from select marketing and tourism types for refusing to hang its hat on one varietal. Yet we've now put it beyond doubt that we're master of many.
In my book, that makes us the most innovative, adaptive, driven and creative wine region in the country. Our local industry is a broad church - and Amen to that.
