The Marlborough Boutique Hotel & Vineyard in Blenheim is surrounded by gardens and a vineyard.
The Marlborough Boutique Hotel & Vineyard in Blenheim is surrounded by gardens and a vineyard.
The Marlborough Boutique Hotel & Vineyard is the ideal base for a luxurious food and wine-filled weekend in Blenheim, writes Johanna Thornton.
Blenheim, in the heart of New Zealand’s Marlborough region, is best known as the country’s wine capital, famed for its world-class sauvignon blanc. With its sunny climate, fertile river valleys, and dry conditions, it’s home to many of New Zealand’s most iconic wineries. The sheer scale of the vineyards is visible from the air as you fly in, past the stunning Marlborough Sounds, accounting for 67% of New Zealand’s total vineyard areas.
With so many cellar doors a short distance from each other, it’s the perfect spot for a weekend wine tour. At the heart of it all, The Marlborough Boutique Hotel & Vineyard is the only place in the region with a luxury hotel, a vineyard and a hatted restaurant, Harvest. It makes for the ideal jump-off point for a weekend filled with the best the area has to offer.
The stunning property comes with a storied history. It was originally a convent built in 1901 for the Sisters of Mercy next to Saint Mary’s Church in Blenheim. Home to 19 nuns, the convent housed a library, music room, sewing room, office and a chapel. It was moved to its current site in 1994 and turned into a B&B.
Today it has 6.4ha of enchanting gardens and a working vineyard growing malbec, merlot, riesling and sauvignon blanc, producing 3500-5000 bottles per year for in-house guests and the restaurant. It’s the vision of owner Angela Dillon, who converted the B&B into a luxury hotel in 2016, creating 10 unique rooms across two storeys, each with its own look and feel.
An aerial view of the gardens, which used to be bare farm.
The property has come a long way since its early days as a sheep farm with a small stand of trees. Dillon designed the landscaping around these original trees, which have since matured into towering specimens and join over 400 trees and shrubs creating various trails around the grounds, including a hydrangea path full of blue flowers, Plantain Lily and rimu, and a native bush walk, both of which border a meandering creek and lake.
Juxtaposing this wild oasis is the lushest of grasses, kept in immaculate condition by robotic lawnmowers Harriet and Harry and perfect for a game of frisbee golf, croquet or pétanque. There’s even a heated swimming pool and a pool house offering cold drinks, towels and sunscreen. On our April visit, it’s harvest season in Marlborough and light bangs can be heard in the distance to scare the birds off the ripe vines.
Inside the Kingfisher room on the first floor.
Inside the hotel, there are four rooms downstairs and six upstairs with a 20-22 maximum capacity, meaning it’s intimate and quiet. We stayed in the Kingfisher room, a “premium room” on the first floor overlooking the gardens and restaurant. Blessed with soaring ceilings and original stained glass windows, it’s elegant and comfortable with a modern ensuite bathroom with full-size rainshower, bath, and dual sinks. Attention to detail abounds, with candles and The Marlborough Lodge-branded matchboxes, bath salts, Ashley & Co bodycare and vases of flowers picked from the garden.
The complimentary mini-bar is stocked with locally made snacks and drinks, or sample a bottle of The Marlborough’s own rose and malbec on the picturesque balcony, accessible through French doors. A full turn-down service is included, which means returning to find the room ready for sleep and a Makana Confectionery chocolate on the pillow.
The chapel was moved to the property and later, in 2018, it was turned into a unique bar for hotel guests.
Guests have exclusive access to The Chapel for cocktail and canapé hour. Like the convent, the chapel was transported to the property in 1999 from Grovetown. Dillon set to work renovating it in 2018, adding sliding glass doors to open it up to an outdoor fire and seating area, and creating a bar serving appropriately named drinks like the Holy Spirit, Dark and Sacred and The Sinner.
Harvest restaurant has great views of the garden.
Harvest is The Marlborough’s signature restaurant, spanning two indoor dining rooms and the orangerie that leads to a generous deck overlooking the garden. It’s popular with locals and visitors to the region (open for lunch and dinner seven days a week) and was awarded one hat in Cuisine‘s Good Food Awards in 2023/2024.
Head chef Wieland Matzig leans on the hotel’s kitchen garden for in-season produce as well as local suppliers for a farm-to-table style menu. The kitchen is famous for its slow-cooked, Mibrasa-braised Lumina lamb shoulder. Designed to share between two, the pull-apart, charcoal-kissed lamb is served with roasted vegetables from the garden, a green salad, and housemade salsa verde and honey mustard. Guests at The Marlborough can exclusively enjoy breakfast at Harvest, which includes a continental buffet and a made-to-order breakfast menu.
A kitchen garden tour is well worth it, with the one-acre organic garden an inspiring oasis of vegetables and flowers. Gardener Santiago led us through tidy but abundant rows filled with cornflowers, radishes, beetroot, kale, silverbeet and crystal apple cucumbers. A highlight was sampling fresh figs from the tree. It’s little wonder this lush corner of the property is popular with bees and pīwakawaka.
The Marlborough Boutique Hotel & Vineyard's impressive kitchen garden.
While The Marlborough is so stunning there’s no reason to leave, there is much to discover on its doorstep. A fun way to tick off several wineries is through Explore Marlborough’s half and full-day biking and driving tours. We enjoyed a guided e-bike tour along the River Cycle Trail, which has easy, flat terrain that takes you right through wine country and alongside the Wairau River.
The first stop on the tour was Huia, which is 9ha with 5.44 under vine, bordered by olive trees. At the winery, chickens and a rooster named Fraggle roam free. Our visit included a bespoke private tasting with cellar door manager Mel to try the Huia Blanc de Blancs 2018, Pinot Gris 2024 and the limited-release Huia Tangle 2024, a mix of pinot gris, viognier and riesling. A blind tasting of Huia Chardonnay 2022 in black wine glasses was a great way to test our biases.
Cloudy Bay's cellar door in Blenheim, Marlborough.
Where Huia is small-scale and certified organic, Cloudy Bay’s Marlborough vineyard includes 163 vineyard parcels and 65 grower blocks. Near the Wairau River, stony, free-draining soils are perfect for growing the winery’s signature sauvignon blanc, while the heavier clay soils of the Southern Valleys suit pinot noir and chardonnay. The winery’s modern cellar door offers tastings and platters, and garden restaurant Jack’s Raw Bar is the place for freshly shucked oysters, Cloudy Bay Clams and share plates, with tables that spill out to a manicured lawn ideal for lounging in a bean bag under the shade of a tree.
At single-vineyard estate Clos Henri, a 15-minute drive away, the focus is on the subtleties between French and New Zealand terroir. It was established in 2000 by the Bourgeois family, who have over 400 years’ worth of winemaking experience in Sancerre, France. Clos Henri’s cellar door is a charming 1920s Presbyterian chapel that was relocated to the vineyard in 2003.
Clos Henri's cellar door is a 1920s Presbyterian chapel.
With the sun shining, we met Clos Henri’s Lara Campbell at one of the shaded picnic tables outside.
“A lot of what we do here at Clos Henri is inspired by that French heritage,” she explains. “The focus is on terroir expression, so how we channel what happens underground into the wines that we drink. Our wines aren’t particularly an expression of varietal, they’re a focused expression of the estate here.”
The vineyard sits at a cross-section of geological ages and characteristics, split by the Wairau faultline into clay loam and stony greywacke. The “Sancerre to Marlborough” tasting experience is a great way to test the subtleties of the clay and stone soils in each location, comparing three of Clos Henri’s French wines with three of its Marlborough wines.
Yes, Marlborough is all about wine, but a gin tasting is a must when it includes a trio of award-winning Roots Marlborough gins. Located in the popular Vines Village precinct, Elemental Distillers’ headquarters include a bespoke distillery, tasting room, restaurant and accommodation. Co-founded by Ben Leggett in 2018, Elemental Distillery prides itself on being fully traceable from root to cup, evidenced in its distillery made entirely of upcycled shipping containers, clad in New Zealand cedar and designed to be as sustainable as possible with solar panels, gravity-fed ethanol systems and water recirculation systems.
The Gin Shack tasting room was added a year ago, transforming the old Astrolabe Wines space into an indoor and outdoor dining area offering delicious small plates from chef Fran Nolan of Boom! Sauce, Spice and Barbecue. There are also local beers, cocktails and, of course, gin tastings. The heart of the operation is the distillery, where a 200l hybrid copper still produces 30,000 bottles a year. You can smell the botanicals in the air, some of them emanating from a big bag of foraged juniper (sourced from Macedonia).
“More people are starting to talk about the origin of their juniper, and just like single-origin coffee, it’s unique to an area and has its own terroir, profile and complexity,” says Leggett.
“Everything we do here is about producing the best London Dry Gin we can. It’s the only legally defined category of gin in the world and it defines minimum production standards. There’s one rule above all else: it must taste predominantly of juniper. The five other botanicals are all about stimulating a spice, a floral, a juicy, an earthy and a citrus [note].”
In the five and a half years since Leggett launched the brand, it’s won seven gold medals and three trophies, including the World’s Best London Dry Gin at the World Gin Awards.
“It’s been an absolutely mad run,” he says. “We took home a bottle of Roots Rosso Pinot Noir Gin, made with pinot noir especially harvested and made every vintage for the gin. A hybrid of vermouth, port and gin, it’s ideal neat as an aperitif.”
If you need a break from all the wining and dining, the Omaka Aviation Heritage Centre in Blenheim is worth a look. It’s home to a rare collection of World War I and World War II aircraft and artefacts, brought to life with the cinematic weight of film-maker Sir Peter Jackson. Housed in two hangars, the first showcases Jackson’s collection of WWI aircraft, complete with immersive sets by WingNut Films and Wētā Workshop. The second, called Dangerous Skies, explores WWII through powerful storytelling, including the tale of trailblazing female fighter ace Lydia Litvyak. The experience finishes with a dramatic highlight: the Stalingrad Experience, a multi-sensory exhibit that uses CGI, surround sound, and special effects to plunge visitors into one of the war’s most harrowing battles.
With luxury stays, world-class wine, and unexpected surprises around every corner, Blenheim proves there’s much more to Marlborough than just a great glass of sauvignon blanc.
The writer was a guest of The Marlborough Boutique Hotel & Vineyard.
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The Marlborough Boutique Hotel & Vineyard, Blenheim, New Zealand
