I met Jayson Bryant of Wine Vault TV through twitter last year. He’s New Zealand’s answer to Gary Vaynerchuk although he hails from Hampshire in England. Bryant set up his store, The Wine Vault, in 2005 and while he’s been in New Zealand since 1998, he hasn’t lost his southern accent.
Wine Vault TV started at the end of 2008 and Bryant admits he cringes when he looks back on the first 40 or so episodes. But as he nears the 200th episode, he’s very comfortable in front of the camera, as I found out when he invited on to his show.
A few days before coming on the show, he asked “What do you want to taste?â€
“Syrahâ€, I answered.
So off I went thinking he was going to pull out a bottle or two of Syrah but he hadn’t taken a blind bit of notice of me! He pulled out two Pinot Noirs. Bloody Southerners.
I’ve not yet been overly impressed with Marlborough Pinot Noir, they lack a bit of structure in my opinion while Martinborough and Central Otago are much more together. So, just to prove me wrong out comes 1996 La Strada Marlborough Pinot Noir from Fromm. It was still alive – just with really earthy, vegetal flavours. I’ve not had the chance to taste a wine with so much age from New Zealand so it was pretty interesting.
I’m not going to reveal any more or it’ll spoil it. We had great fun on the show and it’ll be on the web next week and I’ll embed it on my site too for you to watch. I’m hoping I didn’t swear too much or my mum won’t be pleased.
