Postcard: Greywacke's Kevin Judd from London

In fact, during the last few days of the final trip, crook with a gastro bug in a Jersey hotel, I sent an email cancelling a trip we had already started to plan for early 2020; 'no more travel until after harvest', we promised each other. 'We need a break.'

Well, we certainly got a break, that's for sure. By vintage 2020 the pandemic had us well and truly locked up in our South Pacific quarantine camp, completing our twelfth Greywacke harvest confined to a bubble of nine. Requests to turn back containers and to increase payment terms by an extra three months had the accountant looking rather white-faced, so we set about plotting a modified path for our business and jettisoned a considerable volume from the 2020 vintage.

Predictions that the global wine market would nosedive, spear-headed by the immediate closing of the world's on-trade was a grim outlook for an export-focused wine business that relied heavily on the hotel and restaurant trade.

The medical fraternity were saying it would take many years before vaccines could be made safe and available, so we settled into a peaceful, sedentary life in the Omaka Valley - no visitors, no trips. We got onto some overdue projects at home, put the passports in the drawer and learnt how to navigate Zoom. How and when it would all end was anyone's guess, and what the world might look like once we were eventually able to travel again was constantly in the back of our minds.

Whilst Zoom taught us that some things can be done remotely, there really is nothing like being there, so once the Kiwi border quarantine was lifted, the Greywackers were back on tour, bound for the UK to participate in the 25-year anniversary celebrations of our importer Liberty Wines. Having not yet had the dreaded lurgy and having heard that the Poms had eased up on the mask wearing, there was a certain amount of trepidation as Richelle Tyney and I boarded for Singapore. The extinct Air New Zealand flight NZ1 to London was sorely missed, although transitioning through LA was definitely not, but the queues at Heathrow passport control when we arrived were like nothing I had ever seen before.

Kevin Judd, Warren Gibson and Andy Crozier with Melanie Brown at Pop Brixton.

We had planned to continue our Kiwi-Covid-avoidance habits for most of the trip, so all masked-up we headed to the hotel on the Heathrow Express. After checking in we wandered bleary-eyed into a South Kensington brunch spot, our veiled appearance attracting scrutinizing glances from the locals. We quickly realised that mask wearing was absolutely a thing of the past in the UK, even on the tube during peak hour there were only perhaps 5% of passengers wearing masks.

First event for the week was the Liberty Wines anniversary tasting at The Oval in Kennington, where nearly 400 trade and media came along to taste the wines from 150 different wine producers, each selecting only two of their most evocative and finest wines. The producers were from all over the planet and included fellow Kiwis from Blank Canvas, Framingham, Tinpot Hut, Burn Cottage and Trinity Hill.

The rest of the week's itinerary was severely disrupted by three days of British Rail strike actio - as they say, 'some things never change' - but, despite that, between us we managed to get to tastings and events in St Albans, Colchester, Yorkshire Dales, Edinburgh and Dundee. In London we poured Greywacke at a tasting in Battersea with Philglas and Swiggot (fill glass and swig it) and then four of Liberty's Kiwi team headed down to Brixton to join the ever energetic expat Mel Brown, for her New Zealand Roadtrip Tasting at Specialist Cellars in Pop Brixton. After pouring a taste of New Zealand for about 100 keen attendees we headed down to The Laundry, a historic commercial press laundry re-fitted by Mel as an all-day restaurant, café and wine shop, which opened just in time for the onset of the pandemic and the subsequent crippling series of UK lockdowns.

Soaking up the bustling atmosphere on The Laundry's outdoor terrace, it was clear that there was absolutely no sign of a global pandemic happening in Brixton right now; in fact that had been a consistent observation during the entire trip. It really does seem, from the outside, like Covid is a thing of the distant past in UK. However, under the surface the combination of brutal lockdowns and Brexit has had a huge impact on the UK labour force, with massive numbers of people heading home to other European countries and many previous hospo employees finding other careers less susceptible and/or more family friendly.

On a more positive note, the pandemic and associated lockdowns that closed the on-trade didn't appear to quash UK's love of wine one little bit - in fact the small independent wine merchants reported a steep increase in not only volume of sales, but value of sales and diversity of styles. A newly found level of wine experimentation has evolved in UK and that is now flowing through to the reopened on-trade, allowing more diversity of offerings at restaurants and hotels across the country.

As for Liberty Wines, they've come a long way since 1997 when it was founded by David Gleave MW, then a predominantly Italian specialist and today representing a selection of the best producers from each major wine region around the world. Now employing in excess of 180 staff, their last financial year was reported to be the best ever in terms of revenue and profit, so clearly they have weathered the storm well. And btw, they never did turn that container back to the winery... thankfully!