I have tasted and reviewed a couple of thousand wines over the last few years, posting and sharing my notes across my social media networks.
I’ve also collated reviews from the last 5 years for you to browse. Select About Us, Wine Reviews, from the main menu above then choose a year to read the reviews.
If you’d like me 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/
Cheers, JB
JB’s Wine Background
I’m passionate about New Zealand Wine and 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 via Instagram and Facebook
I read about, blog about, share information about, tweet 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