Claire Finlayson
The worms in question monstered the apples on the Taylors’ backyard tree in Auckland. This prompted a teenage Grant to seek out a cider recipe in one of his mum’s cookbooks and turn the salvageable fruit flesh into something drinkable. It wasn’t his first foray into liquid refreshments – he was already a seasoned expert in the art of home-brewed ginger beer. “My job was to make the ginger beer bug – I enjoyed watching it divide and ferment.”
The cider, though, proved much more thrilling. Grant’s 14-year-old friends thought so too. “The first lot was probably half a percent alcohol, but by the time I’d figured out the effect of adding sugar, it went up to something like 6%. One of my friends drank quite a lot of it right before a School Certificate exam. I’m guessing he was a bit nervous because he got quite drunk and abused the headmaster.”
These audacious DIY chemistry experiments were not celebrated in the Taylor household. “My punishment was no pocket money for a year. I find it quite ironic because I now get paid to do the same thing that I got my pocket money confiscated for.”
After finishing school, Grant couldn’t wait to escape the city. “All my favourite times were spent at my grandparents’ sheep farm in the Catlins. I was a bit of a hippie so I really wanted to get back to the land.” To earn money for university, he worked in the freezing works in the Catlins for a couple of years. While most of his workmates spent the bulk of their earnings on Friday night beers, Grant and a couple of friends used their pay packet to explore the wine shelves. “We’d end up in the same state on a Saturday morning as every freezing worker, but we’d go to the bottle shop and try a different bottle of Asti Spumante every week. It was just curiosity really.”
When he enrolled at Lincoln College in Canterbury for a Diploma in Agriculture (with a viticulture course on the side) he found that wine drinking was not the norm there, either. “I love beer, but I wasn’t the beer-drinking/rugby-watching sort, so some of us formed a little wine drinking group.”
After Lincoln, Grant set off to see the world, and it was while visiting friends in Napa Valley in California that he stumbled into an assistant winemaking role at Pine Ridge Winery. “I didn’t really have a plan – I’m still not sure I do. I sometimes tell people I’m just making wine until I figure out what I want to do with my life.”
What he lacked in formal winemaking qualifications, he made up for in keenness. “I think my Kiwi work ethic got me the job. Having worked on a farm I was used to labouring in the weekends and late in the evening. In the Catlins you’d be on a tractor as soon as the sun came up, you’d eat a sandwich on the tractor for your lunch and finish up at 10 o’clock at night.”
He spent six years at Pine Ridge, during which time he became co-winemaker alongside the owner, Gary Andrus. He then spent six years helping establish another winery, Domaine Napa. “They were the good old days. I’m sitting out here in the Hakataramea Valley still dreaming about them.”
That Napa Valley nous (along with what he learnt from vintages in France and Australia) was eventually put to good use back to New Zealand. When he returned for a holiday in 1992, Alan Brady offered him a job as winemaker at Gibbston Valley Wines. The timing was perfect; Grant was ripe for a new challenge.
At that stage, there were only 20 hectares of grapes in Central Otago (compared with today’s 2,000 plus hectares). Grant was part of that surge, Alan says. “Grant was very much at the heart of everything Gibbston Valley in the early days. He was quickly recognised as one of Central Otago’s leading winemakers and went on to become one of New Zealand’s leading Pinot Noir exponents. He won medals for the company by the bucketful.”
Grant produced first vintages for a raft of the region’s best-known labels, including the likes of Mt Difficulty, Felton Road, Carrick, Peregrine, Mount Edward and Rockburn. This breadth of experience proved invaluable. “That’s when I really started to learn about Otago Pinot.” He was clearly a fast learner; his wines went on to win the trophy for ‘World’s Best Pinot Noir’ at the International Wine and Spirits Competition an unprecedented four times.
Though the terroir of Central Otago is much lauded, Grant says the region’s secret sauce is its spirit of collegiality. “When I first arrived there in 1993, there were only three other winemakers. We didn’t have a lot of fruit, but one day a week we were in each other’s wineries. We all knew different things and worked together as one person. That’s why Central Otago has got to where it has.”
In 1998 Grant established his own label, Valli, so that he could explore the aspect of winemaking that intrigued him the most: the differences between the Otago subregions. These days he’s applying that fascination to his new home in the Waitaki. “It has a completely different climate and soils. My knowledge of subregions has allowed me to make gains in Waitaki much faster than those I made in Central.”
Grant and wife Nicole moved to the Hakataramea Valley in 2024, after renovat-ing the old Post Office building in Kurow to house their new Valli Wine Bar. Does this latest venture suggest that he has a low boredom threshold? “Guilty”, Grant says. “My birth certificate says I’m turning 70 next year, but I’m pretty sure I’m still only 30.”
But this move has a whiff of permanence to it. “I was born in Kurow. When I came back here it felt like home – even though I left when I was four. It’s like those salmon that get spawned way up the river and when they get to the ocean, they turn and go back to where they started. I’m a bit like that. I feel so much at home here – it’s just instinctual.”
He’s quite the Kurow evangelist these days. “It feels like ‘real New Zealand’ to me. The sense of community and the way people care for each other here is unlike anything I’ve experienced anywhere in the world. The maternity hospital where I was born is now an old folks home. I often tell people that I’m going to start and end life in the same room.”
Asked if Pinot Noir is still his favourite child, Grant says he’s not so sure anymore. I’ve fallen in love with Waitaki Chardonnay lately – it’s just stunning. It’s sort of the new girlfriend. I’ve gone out with Pinot Noir for so long that we’ve fallen into a boring routine. But don’t let Chardonnay hear that because I’ve got Chenin Blanc in mind next.”
This article was first published in New Zealand Winegrower magazine issue 148 and is republished with permission.
