Gibbston Valley Wine Cave: What It Is Like Inside

You are twenty five minutes out of Queenstown, the gorge has just opened into vineyards, and then the tour walks you into the side of a hill. It is the moment most people remember from a Central Otago wine day, and it is worth knowing what you are walking into.

The cave at Gibbston Valley Winery is described by the tour operators who use it as the largest underground wine cave in New Zealand. Three of the four daily wine tours from Queenstown include a guided walk and a tasting inside it.

Why a cave, and not a shed

This is not decoration. Wine ageing in barrel wants two things above all: a temperature that does not move, and humidity high enough that the barrels do not dry out and the wine does not evaporate through the wood.

Above ground in Central Otago you get the opposite of that. The region has hot dry days and cold nights, and the swing between them is one of the widest of any wine region in the country. A shed would need constant energy to hold a steady temperature, and it would still fight the dry air.

Cut into rock, you get both conditions for free. A few metres of stone above your head holds a stable cool temperature all year regardless of what the weather is doing outside, and the rock holds moisture. It is the oldest cellar technology there is and nobody has improved on it.

What it is like inside

Cooler than you expect, and the change hits you in the first few steps. Quiet, in the particular way that underground spaces are quiet, because the rock absorbs sound rather than bouncing it. And it smells of oak and damp stone before it smells of wine.

The tunnel runs back into the hill with barrels stacked along both sides, lit low. It is working storage rather than a museum, so the barrels are full and the numbers chalked on the ends mean something to somebody.

Tastings happen down there rather than upstairs in the cellar door, which is the part that makes it different from every other stop on a wine tour. You are drinking the wine in the place it was made, at the temperature it was kept.

The practical part, which nobody tells you

It is cold. Not unpleasant, but genuinely cooler than outside, and in summer the contrast is sharp because you have come in from a hot dry valley. Take a layer with you off the van rather than leaving it on your seat.

The floor is stone and it can be damp. Sensible shoes. This is not the stop for anything with a heel.

Photographs are hard. Very low light, warm point sources, dark rock. Your phone will either blur or blow out the lamps. Brace against a barrel, tap to focus on something lit, and pull the exposure down rather than up. The picture you want is the tunnel receding, not the barrel in front of you.

It is short. The cave is one stop on a longer day, not the day itself. Go in knowing that and you will enjoy it more than if you were expecting an hour.

Getting there

Gibbston is about twenty five minutes from Queenstown, out through the Kawarau Gorge on the road towards Cromwell. It is close enough to drive yourself, and that is exactly where the problem starts: the whole point of the stop is a tasting, and the road back is a gorge.

If you are driving, somebody in the car is not tasting. If nobody wants to be that person, that is the argument for a tour, and it is a better argument than any of the marketing.

If this is the part that interests you

Two of the four daily tours build the day around it. The Classic tour stays in Gibbston and includes the cave in a four hour afternoon. The Gourmet tour includes it too, then carries on over the hills to a long lunch. The full comparison is in our guide to the four wine tours from Queenstown.

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General background on visiting an underground wine cave in Gibbston. Access is through the tours and the cellar door that operate it. Published by Connecting Queenstown, a Queenstown marketplace.