Here's an example where your metering method--whether it be Spot, Center-Weighted or Evaluative--simply won't work reliably.
Brutal highlights and nearly black backgrounds call for metering off something else entirely, such as a gray card or something with "average" reflectance. Nice green grass works well, by the way.
I had no gray card (or grass), so I metered off the northern sky and got a pretty good average reading. This is the jpg straight out of the camera. And yes, sometimes I do shoot jpg.