A private West Coast tour combining Piha Beach with real wine tasting at Auckland's oldest winery.
A private tour for your group only, through the Waitākere Ranges to Piha, with genuine wine tasting at Auckland's oldest winery.
This is a private tour for your group only. Real stops include the Waitākere Ranges, Piha Beach, and wine tasting/lunch at the genuine oldest winery in the region.
A popular starting point — every Voyzo itinerary is fully customizable, so we'll shape the order and stops around your group.
Hotel pickup in central Auckland.
A genuine, historic wine estate.
Genuine rainforest terrain.
No other travelers.
Back to your hotel, home, or the airport — whenever your day wraps up.
A private tour for your group only, through the Waitākere Ranges to Piha, with genuine wine tasting at Auckland's oldest winery. This is a private tour for your group only. Real stops include the Waitākere Ranges, Piha Beach, and wine tasting/lunch at the genuine oldest winery in the region.
West Auckland's wine industry has real roots going back to the late 19th century, when Croatian (often called Dalmatian) immigrants arrived to dig kauri gum in the region's gumfields. Many brought viticultural knowledge from home, and by the 1940s that knowledge had turned into an actual wine industry around the newly settled towns of Kumeu and Huapai — the area's first winery opened in 1940, led by families such as the Nobilos and the Brajkovichs, decades before most of the rest of the country caught on.
That timing matters: Marlborough, now New Zealand's largest wine region by far, didn't see its first commercial vines go into the ground until August 1973, when the company Montana planted Müller-Thurgau and cabernet sauvignon in the Wairau Valley — and even that first planting largely failed in the following summer's drought. Kumeu and Huapai, by contrast, already had a working commercial wine industry more than three decades earlier, making West Auckland one of the country's genuinely original wine-growing areas, outside of Hawke's Bay's own mission-planted vineyards from the 1850s.
The drive there runs through Waitākere Ranges Regional Park, New Zealand's first regional park, established in 1964 on top of an earlier 1940 centennial reserve and now protecting roughly 16,000 hectares of native bush. That bush is regrowth: between 1840 and 1940, 23 separate timber mills operated in these ranges, taking an estimated 120,000 kauri trees before the last significant stands were finally protected.
Every Voyzo tour is a starting point — tell us what you have in mind and we'll build it.