JB, Owner & Wineguy at the NZ Wine Directory has tasted and reviewed a couple of thousand wines over the last few years, posting and sharing his notes across social media networks & on the NZ Wine Directory.
He has also collated reviews from the last 5 years for you to browse. Select About The Directory from the main menu above then choose a year to read the reviews. If you’d like JB to review & promote your wines, from a ‘well practiced consumer’ point of view, all the details are here: https://nzwinedirectory.co.nz/about/submit-wine-for-review/
JB’s Wine Background
After 14 years working with the New Zealand Film Library, my career moved to the Library, Information & Education sectors, working for the National Library of New Zealand, Curriculum information Service / Services to Schools in Christchurch. In my role as Reference Librarian & Learning Area Selector, for Technology & Mathematics, I worked with a team contributing to loan of curriculum resources to all schools in the South Island.
I learned and developed a lot of skills and knowledge around information technology, the internet, and the emerging social media platforms. I worked on several national projects, such as Any Questions and Many Answers that provide to this day, access for students to authoritative information to support learning online. I was later the South Island Coordinator for the Curriculum Information Service, managing the team of Reference Librarians and Dispatch staff providing the service. After government restructuring and redundancy in 2009 I started the NZ Wine Directory…
I’ve always loved wine and am passionate about New Zealand Wine, my wine knowledge and experience comes from many years of buying, trying & tasting wine. I review as many New Zealand wines as I can each year and share my ‘consumer focused’ notes and images across social media.
I read about, blog about, share information about, and just love everything about #NZWINE… I attend as many wine events as I can, visiting cellar doors and events, and even had a few years making it albeit on a small and amateur scale.
I was a member of the Pegasus Amateur Wine Making Club in Christchurch NZ in the 1980s – over a 10 year period I made a wide range of wines out of all sorts of fruit (and other things) and had a great deal of success with the likes of my Dry Apricot, Sparking Kiwi fruit and Feijoa bubbles and later on moved from fruit to actual grape based wines.
I started with Albany Surprise, Black Hamburg and an unknown grape variety brought into New Zealand by my parent’s Croatian neighbors: they made gallons of a rich dark sweet wine every year as they drank it with every meal.
The Wine club quite often would assist with local winemaker’s harvests and we would get a bucket or two of grapes to take home and carefully make into our own wine – Muller Thurgau and Chardonnay from St Helena, sometimes we would be able to get juice from Giesen wines such as Muller Thurgau and Riesling.
The best I ever made was from a trial plot of Pinot Noir at St Helena – Daniel Schuster was growing some there and I managed to get enough grapes to make a one gallon jar full – couple of oak staves, fermented in a plastic bucket, racked into a jar, finished, settled, filtered and then bottled – Glenys and I drank one bottle each year for 6 years… and it wasn’t too shabby either.
As I started to taste more and more New Zealand wines in the late 80’s and into the 90’s I really started to see that others made much better wines than I could ever achieve and after a couple of catastrophic failures (2 x 5 Gal Glass Carboys of infected Elderberry) I gradually gave up on that hobby and developed my new passion for New Zealand Wine.
Since then I have been keeping tasting notes on the wines I have purchased, consumed, tasted and enjoyed at home, wine events, wine clubs and festivals.
I was a member of Cellarmasters (Liquorland) VP of The New Brighton Wine Club, attended tastings at Vino Fino, Liquor King and other wine shops in Christchurch, and at many cellar doors when visiting the wine regions of New Zealand.
After the Christchurch Earthquakes we moved to Blenheim in 2012 and I spent 2 years in fine wine retail at Wino’s Liquor in Blenheim selling premium wines and craft beers, facilitating at wine tasting events etc. I also was privileged to be able to attend many Marlborough wine events / awards and festivals and got to know the wine industry folk of the region really well.
For family reasons we relocated to Taranaki in 2015 where we are based now. Thanks goodness there are a couple of wine clubs here in New Plymouth.
Although supposedly retired, I am now very busy with the NZ Wine Directory and everything involved in running an online business: website management, social media, wine reviews and much much more! Sing out if you have any questions.
Cheers,
JB