Grant Taylor - King of the vines

His early teenage dabbling in homemade apple cider may have landed him in hot water at high school but Grant Taylor went on to produce five world champion Central Otago pinot noir wines, catapulting this region onto the international stage.

Born in Kurow in the Waitaki Valley in 1955, the son of a Railways stationmaster constantly being posted to new towns, Grant grew up in Maheno, Otira, Napier, Porirua, and Auckland, where he finished high school.

“We never had a hometown. My best memories were staying on our grandparents’ farm in Owaka between moves,” Grant says.

It was while at Auckland’s Selwyn College that Grant first experimented with fermentation, leaving his mates a little worse for wear. “Our apple tree apples had worms in them, so I borrowed Mum’s cookbook and made apple cider. I found out the more sugar you added the more the alcohol effect,” he grins. He shared it with his 14-year-old mates. “We had locker rooms exploding at school. One guy got drunk, turning up at his School Cert exam and abusing the headmaster.” Grant lost his pocket money over that one.

His dad always had a small wine cellar and while studying for a Diploma in Agriculture at Lincoln Grant formed an unofficial wine club, mostly about drinking, but early inklings were there.

Heading to the US, Grant worked on a horse ranch and Alaskan farm before joining uni exchange student friends from Napa Valley where he worked in construction. They discovered Napa wine tasting weekends and free alcohol. Grant’s building skills and farm boy flexibility landed him an assistant winemaking job at Pine Ridge Winery, just being built, ahead of wine graduates from the prestigious Davis University.

He spent hours studying the winemaker’s text books, scoring the job when the winemaker left. “All of a sudden it was the owner and I doing the harvest.”

Winemaking courses at Davis and Napa College helped and after six years he was headhunted by a French winemaker to work at Domaine Napa Winery. This was despite Grant having chalked Rainbow Warrior protest peace signs on the back of his grape containers.
“We got best sauvignon blanc at the California State Fair one year but it’s the grapes, not the winemaker. We’re just the babysitter,” says a typically humble Grant.

He returned for a few Southern Hemisphere vintages in Western Australia and Coopers Creek in the early 1990s.

He’d noticed some early Central Otago wines at a friend’s West Auckland winery. Holidaying back home with fellow Kiwi winemaker Steve Davies, they did a road tour to check them out – Gibbston Valley, Black Ridge, Taramea and Rippon. Rudi Bauer at Rippon was extremely welcoming, and Gibbston Valley founder Alan Brady, just starting to make waves, was looking for a winemaker. Grant used ‘trial and error’ to adapt new techniques for this region and in 1998 his Gibbston Valley wines produced in a perfect hot summer won top honours at the NZ Wine Awards. “I was head down and didn’t even think of trophies,” he says. “We stood by the wine press juice tray cupping our hands and tasting it, rubbing it through our hair. We’d never tasted young wine like it before.”

Many golds and trophies followed.

By 2001 Gibbston Valley Wines had won the world’s best pinot noir at the London International Wine and Spirits Competition, stunning generations of leading European winemakers with well established vines.

Grant had planted a small crop of his own on his Valli Vineyard at Gibbston in 1998. His ‘most heartbreaking moment’ came when a severe, unpredicted November frost hit the region. Driving back from a weekend’s West Coast whitebaiting he noticed brown vines at Lowburn. “They’d been green a few days earlier.” He pretty much walked away from that vintage. “That’s farming.”

However, by 2010 he’d won the London International Challenge with his own Valli Pinot. “It was bare land and in 10 years had produced the world’s best pinot noir. That was the pinnacle.”

His grapes then won the title again after he’d sold 100 dozen of his 2013 to another label. He’s also worked on world champion vintages for others.

Grant’s been making wine for 44 years - 31 years in Otago, and Valli celebrates its 25th anniversary in February.

Like a Waitaki salmon travelling full circle, Grant’s returning home to his Kurow roots next month where he’s had a vineyard since 2003. He and wife Nicole have just launched a wine bar, after restoring the old Kurow Post Office along the Alps to Ocean Cycleway. They’re retaining their Gibbston vineyard and home though.

Despite the long hours, Grant says he ‘retired 50 years ago’. “I’ve been asked to consult but to me that’s ‘con’ and ‘insult’. If you know it, you want to share that knowledge for free, just to help people.”