My mother-in-law is a doughty New Zealander whose home is well stocked with emergency provisions — particularly wine — for the next big earthquake. This could come at any time. Her lovely wooden house overlooks Wellington harbour, an immense volcanic crater, and the valley out the back runs along the main Pacific fault line. This landscape is scary, beautiful and significant, as the fault links two hidden gems for wine lovers.

From her picture window, Granny can see the highway that follows the line of the fault northeast to the distant Rimutaka Hills. It runs on a harbourside strip of land thrown up by the last big quake in 1855 — which enabled a settler called John Martin to reach the Rimutakas and build a little town on the far side. He designed it like a Union Jack and named it after himself. For more than a century, Martinborough’s few hundred souls raised sheep and cows. But in the late 1970s, government scientists pinpointed it as the “climatic analogue of Burgundy”, geek-speak for a great place to make wine. Now vineyards run among the sweet colonial houses on the outer streets of John Martin’s Union Jack. On a winter’s afternoon, muffled-up old ladies prune their pinot noir as they might prune their floribunda in an English village.

Pinot noir, Burgundy’s red grape, can produce exceptionally tasty wine from the town’s gravelly soils and dry autumns; but the weather has gone haywire in some recent vintages, ravaging the already tiny output. Most of it is snapped up by New Zealanders. A cult is growing around Hiroyuki Kusuda, a former Japanese diplomat whose first taste of Martinborough pinot was so life-changing that he now makes his own exquisite wine there. It’s unlikely to reach the UK; but two other newcomers, Katherine Jacobs and her husband, Jeremy Corban, are trying to get into the British market with their intense Big Sky wines. Katherine trained as a winemaker while Jeremy — from one of NZ’s oldest wine families — was working at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris. Now she looks after Big Sky while he commutes down the fault line to Wellington, where he’s a Treasury official.

If you have the time and the money to make the journey to this idyllic little town (there’s a wine festival every November), remember one precaution. Leaving Martinborough this month, I found myself in a roadblock where police breath-tested every driver. Luckily, I had sipped and spat. But I was so shocked that, when Granny offered to split a lunchtime bottle of Big Sky with me at her local bistro, I said I was driving. (I wasn’t.) I’ll write about the other wine jewel on her fault line next week. It couldn’t be more different.

LIQUID HUNCHES

Murdoch James Martinborough Pinot Noir 2007, £12.99

Delicate, fragrant and appetising (Oddbins).

Palliser Estate Martinborough Pinot Noir 2006, £14.99

Ripe and rich, a soothing balm (Virgin Wines).

Ata Rangi Pinot Noir 2007, £34.95

Serious and meaty, with a glorious future (nzhouseofwine.co.uk).

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