WineNZ Summer 18-19 (1)

feature | kevin judd
A winemaker’s
other life
Paul Taggart talks to Kevin Judd about
photography, Greywacke’s growing
success and his time at Cloudy Bay
Kevin Judd and dog Dixie.
With the benefit of
hindsight, some
careers and even
the growth of
whole industries
can seem almost
pre-determined. But the reality is often much
different. Even the whole Marlborough
sauvignon blanc success was largely a
surprise to most in the industry in the
first decade or so. Some wineries were
still happily planting Müller-Thurgau in
Marlborough in the eighties, thinking its
high cropping would produce good wine
profits.
And with careers, for every person who
knows from the age of five they want to be
a doctor or a firefighter, there are a dozen
who fall into a career, or have it decided for
them by circumstances out of their control.
With Kevin Judd, he’s always had two
strings to his bow, and has been pragmatic
enough to allow the changing winds of both
industries — wine and photography — to
dictate his path in life.
Kevin was born in England, but when he
was nine his family emigrated to Australia,
and he went to school in Adelaide.
At high school he was good at science,
but didn’t want to make paint or work in
a factory. He visited a few wineries in
the Barossa, and winemaking sounded
like an interesting job, so he enrolled at
Roseworthy.
“I wasn’t sure I had made the right
decision after the first year; I felt out of
my depth. I wasn’t much of a wine drinker
when I started,” he said.
Fortunately he stuck with it, and after a
two-year stint at Chateau Reynella, before it
was bought by the Hardys group, he came to
New Zealand and worked at Selaks Wines.
Then David Hohnen came along, Cloudy
Bay was established, and the rest is history.
But in parallel with his winemaking
life, Kevin has always been a passionate
photographer. His father was an amateur
snapper and had his own darkroom, which
could have been where the passion came
from.
While at Cloudy Bay, Kevin did a fair
amount of photography.
A visit to Marlborough by UK-based
professional photographer Mick Rock in
1990 encouraged Kevin to take his hobby
more seriously.
A lot of his photographic work after that
involved supplying quality stock images to
Mick’s Cephas Picture Library in London,
which has thousands of Kevin’s photographs
on file.
He also produced two books featuring
his photographs, and provided illustrations
for a number of other publications.
This is where it gets interesting — and
where serendipity and the evolving power
and influence of the internet took control
of Kevin’s future.
When he walked out the door of Cloudy
Bay for the last time, plans were already
in place for Greywacke, but Kevin was
“
I wasn’t sure I
had made the
right decision
after the first
year; I felt out
of my depth.
I wasn’t much
of a wine drinker
when I started.”
50 WineNZ Magazine | Summer 2018-19