My name is Colin West. While traveling this world's wine regions, I've now landed in New Zealand,
where I'm meeting up with the local Kiwi girl, Joe Holly, and a film crew.
And we're going through the country's top wine regions to check out the natural beauty,
the adventure sports, and the wine. The wine ram experience. It's the way I'm spreading my
passion of wine to the world. Beginning the show in Queensland was one of the better choices that
I ever made. It was a spot that was full of wine, tourists and people traveling through the country,
and of course, extreme sports. And so overall, this first episode that we filmed there for the
crew and I was one of the better experiences that I think we had filming in the entire country.
We had such good support from the very beginning with Johnny Barr as a local food company. And
then we had the lab that put me up for months on end and shot over Lodge, another hotel down the
street, gave Joe and I a room just before we took off for the show for about a month. Queenstown was
full of so many different extreme sports activities. We got to go and check out WaterSport World where
they gave us a couple of jet skis to go around and film for the trailer. We even sent our director
up on Endzone Skydive to go do a bit of filming for the trailer as well. For the first episode,
one of the most difficult things that I found was actually getting everything coordinated.
Not for pre-production, but on that day, we were dealing with the weather which was actually scheduled
to rain. So I was quite scared and I knew that James was due to take off in about two weeks time
and this was the only day we had to film it. And so we were lucky enough to have over-the-top
helicopters come on board and give us a chopper to get around everywhere a little bit quicker.
And we visited Josh Clark up on the top of Skyline Gondola and got to film the mountain
biking sequence there. And then we flew over to the winery at Peregrine Wines and filmed the whole
vineyard and wine tasting area before we got up on top of Cecil Peak over Lake Wachitapu,
which was absolutely gorgeous. And we got to do a helicopter camping scene there at Sunset.
When we got to the top of Cecil Peak, it was the perfect end to a great day.
How do you follow it over? What are you doing?
You have just entered the tent with the most interest in that.
After we filmed the first episode, we got to go off and do something that we were calling the
Shot Over Wine Ram experience. It was an outing that was involving adventure sports and wines,
but also surrounding a bit of a local area called the Shot Over River. So we went off
and we went skate shooting with a local provider there. And I hadn't been behind a shotgun for
a little while, so I was a bit rusty. However, Joe was a novice and managed to kill it.
At that point, we were actually taking out some local fans from the show that had won that at
the launch party. And so we went over and we checked out Peregrine Winery, which was the location
where we filmed the first episode. And they got to taste a bit of wine in the region after doing
an adventure sport and seeing really what we were all about. A couple of days beforehand,
Joe had taken me to meet up with one of her friends who was in the area promoting their
feature film called Netherwood. And so they showed us what they were about and we went to a barbecue
and checked out their film, but we made sure to get them to have a bit of a taste of wine ram.
And so we stopped by Gibson Valley Winery and we did a bit of a tasting with them.
Before, however, I had met up with the chief winemaker at a music festival in the region
where he was hanging out promoting his winery, drinking some wines and having a good time like
winemakers do. Now, pre-production for the episode really started when I got Sarah, a girl who I'd
met from the States to actually fly down from Auckland. And so she, in return for quite a bit
of coffee, worked her tail off during pre-production for us, focusing a bit on public relations,
promotions and being a great production assistant. Another guy who was there from the beginning
was Rupert. He was actually supposed to be over in Australia working on a Steven Spielberg film,
yet I convinced him to fly back to New Zealand and work on this idea I had. And so we spent
eight months in Queenstown in pre-production and in return for heaps of coffee, the two of these
guys helped me bring this idea to life. It was during this time that we hooked up with people
like James Holman, who his nickname is Hollywood, which makes sense because after deciding he was
going to work with us, I was supposed to meet him one morning for coffee. And next thing I knew,
I call him on the phone and he's in Auckland in a plane on his way to LA, where he was nominated
at the ISFF for the best emerging filmmaker. This was an award actually that he won and took home,
which made it quite nice to say we're working with such an award-winning director.
We're also lucky enough to have Joe Holly, a local Kiwi presenter from Auckland, who flew down to
help us with the series. And it was a great addition to the team and she was really skilled at what
she was doing. James had to take off for a couple of weeks and so we had Elise and Luca, some camera
operators who were traveling through the country, join the team and at that time we took off to
Christchurch. We are Elise and Luca and we're really excited to be heading out on the WineRam
experience project. It should be a lot of fun, hopefully some good times ahead, hopefully we'll
learn a lot about wine. See you out there.
you
