Review: A luxury experience in the mild west

Review: A luxury experience in the mild west
Waimauku's Hunting Lodge vineyard and restaurant started life as an actual hunting lodge.
Helen van Berkel
Waimauku’s Hunting Lodge has long had a reputation as a fine-dining destination, and as the summer begins to unspool with the promise of hot, dry, lazy days and Sunday drives into the country, I set out to find out if it still deserved it. The journey out west seems to get longer every year as Auckland's growth continues to outstrip the new roads built to keep the population moving. We hit the traffic almost as soon as the Northwestern Motorway ended and crawled until we could turn off to take the backroads through Riverhead...

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