Hawke's Bay Region

Hawke's Bay is really twin cities -- Napier and Hastings sit about 20km apart and function as one combined urban area, with Havelock North as a smaller, more affluent satellite town nearby. The region is one of New Zealand's "Great Wine Capitals," with 200+ vineyards, 125 wine producers and 30+ cellar doors producing over 40,000 tonnes of grapes a year -- the wine industry alone contributes an estimated $300 million to the regional economy.

Cyclone Gabrielle (February 2023) caused over $1.2 billion in regional damage and hit roughly 300 hectares of the region's 4,800 hectares of vineyard hard through flooding; silt clearance in Hastings alone cost around $228 million, centrally government-funded. Two years on, the wine sector is reported as largely recovered and reopened -- worth knowing if older news coverage of the flooding is the main thing you've seen about the region, since the on-the-ground picture now is a functioning, high-producing wine economy rather than an ongoing disaster recovery.