WineNZ Summer 18-19 (1)

feature | kevin judd
What really happened at
Cloudy Bay
Kevin Judd and his faithful dog Dixie.
It has been a decade since Kevin Judd
established Greywacke, but despite
his new label’s 10 successful vintages
and growth into more than 40 overseas
markets, the conversation inevitably leads
back to Cloudy Bay, the world’s best-known
New Zealand wine brand.
The Cloudy Bay story has been re-told
so many times not many won’t have heard
it, but for anyone who has been out of town
since 1984, an abridged version is on the
opposite page.
Also re-told in various publications has
been the story of how Kevin left the business
he had been a part of for 25 years and had
helped grow in to a phenomenon.
The general theme of past articles has
been that on his 50th birthday, Kevin had
an epiphany, left Cloudy Bay to reinvent
himself as the owner of his own successful
winery.
In one version of the story, the epiphany
happened on an aeroplane when he bumped
into a former Cloudy Bay employee who
extolled the virtue of self-employment.
While these stories are all rooted in fact,
the actual departure was less Biblical in
nature, more the sort of experience many
of us have after having worked for too long
in a corporate environment.
Kevin gave his all to Cloudy Bay for a
quarter of a century, under David Hohnen
and later Veuve Clicquot (part of luxury
goods group LVMH), which bought
Cloudy Bay from David and brother
Mark Hohnen in several chunks from
1990 through to 2003, when David
sold his last block of shares.
While a key element in the business’
success and growth, Kevin had no
equity in the company and was still,
basically, a wages slave. But it was
a job he loved and he saw himself
being there for the long haul. However,
the issues of working in a corporate
environment, changing reporting lines
and restructuring, which could have
taken Kevin out of winemaking, did
weigh on his mind until he finally
decided it was time to make a move.
Leaving winemaking behind for a
corporate role within the LVMH empire
may not have been the right step for a
man who enjoys the peace of the vineyard
and the barrel room.
When asked a few years back whether
he’d prefer to spend time with a group
of winemakers or with a group of
photographers, Kevin replied that he’d
actually rather be in the company of his
dog Dixie.
He has been described as a man of few
words. When hearing that description, one
wine writer said that he thought “few” was
being generous.
So it wasn’t an epiphany that resulted
in Kevin packing his sandwich box and
flask — more an accumulation of factors
largely outside his control which eventually
made his decision inevitable.
When Kevin walked out the gate in
2009, he was armed with a mountain of
experience, and while Cloudy Bay’s success
was partly the result of “right time, right
place”, something that couldn’t be repeated,
there were other aspects of the success
Kevin had learnt and subconsciously filed
away for just such a rainy day.
The Greywacke name had been registered
by Kevin in 1993, so the idea of having his
own label had been with him for a while;
it just took a round of corporate changes
to give him the push he needed.
Greywacke, which he runs with wife
Kimberley, is an interesting model. It only
has a tiny quantity of its own grapes, buying
most from established growers. It uses
the Dog Point winery premises to make
its wine, and you won’t find the brand on
supermarket shelves.
These business decisions were the result
of lessons learnt over years in the industry.
Having millions of dollars tied up in land
and buildings wasn’t the way to get a
new startup quickly into the black, was
Kevin’s logic.
What you do need, however, is excellent
winemaking. Some say a chimpanzee could
make Marlborough sauvignon blanc, and in
some years, and with some fruit, possibly
they could.
But Kevin’s meticulous, perfectionist
traits mean he has made some spectacular
wines from sub-standard fruit, even in
his early days with Selaks Wines, near
Auckland. It was one of the factors that
had caught the attention of David Hohnen
of Western Australia’s Cape Mentelle
Vineyards, who founded Cloudy Bay.
That said, another of the factors that put
Cloudy Bay at the head of the pack during
Kevin’s years, was an unwillingness to drop
standards. If fruit wasn’t up to scratch for
the Cloudy Bay brand it wasn’t used, and
would end up in the bottles of other wineries
with different quality expectations.
Kevin retains that perfectionist approach
at Greywacke, where he makes wine only
with the best fruit available — some of
it coming from his former Cloudy Bay
colleague Ivan Sutherland’s family vineyard.
These wines are very good. A fact that
underlines the point is that Greywacke has
entered just three WineNZ tastings.
I don’t want to toot our own horn too
loudly here, but the WineNZ tastings are
not like the supermarket tastings or the wine
industry tastings, and they certainly are not
like the one-man-sitting-at-home-handingout-gold-stickers-willy-nilly
tastings. The
WineNZ tastings are professional, with
high-quality, paid judges, with the aim
of providing consumers with an honest
assessment as to which wines are worth
buying. The judges are not influenced by
the reputations of entrants, as they don’t
know who they are.
In that environment — against a big
54 WineNZ Magazine | Summer 2018-19