Lockdown Stories: View From The Vines

As our lives and horizons suddenly closed in around us, growing more limited in the year of Covid-19, it was perhaps difficult to appreciate what other people ‘out there’, elsewhere in the world, were experiencing and feeling. Peter Richards MW spoke to winemakers in six different nations to find out how they and their teams coped as events developed

- Peter Richards MW

Surreal. That’s the word many winemakers use about the lockdown, a stark new reality that defined 2020: the year that Covid-19 struck. ‘It was like floating in a bubble – your world feels undone, uncoupled’, is how California-based flying winemaker Paul Hobbs describes it. Given the unfolding pandemic and mounting death toll, some even started to question their profession. ‘Working in a winery felt perverse, almost devoid of reason at times,’ recalls winemaker and writer Oliver Styles in Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand.

When things kicked off, the harvest was underway in the southern hemisphere. Most governments deemed wine an ‘essential business’, thus exempt from shutting down. A historically early vintage in areas including South America proved a godsend logistically, as the fruit was already largely in wineries come the start of lockdown.