Covid The Barbarian!!
Covid - How Did It Affect Our Business?
Ok, so the first bit is obvious - we had to shut down, twice; but so did most businesses. A bit ouchy and at times terrifying, but so it was UK wide.
But it doesn’t end there….. if only it did!!
Just because we grow grapes to make wine, it doesn’t make us any different to other arable farms. We just convert what we grow into an end product here on site. If customers are not allowed to visit us, we can’t sell wine and the income stops.
No income and no bank balance meant no staff…sorry folks, you are all on furlough.
Now try telling the vines, all 11,000 of them (each of which get a personal visit approximately 14 times per year), that they need to hold off growing until the staff can come back to train them to grow upright. But it seems the vines only understand “Vinusian” so they just kept growing; and grow they did. Russ and Philippa couldn’t even make a dent in what was happening. By the end of the first lockdown, the vines were not upright with the fresh air blowing through them the way they should be. Instead they were trailing on the floor like spiders legs, and the rabbits were destroying them.
When we came out of lockdown at the end of May 2020 and the staff returned from furlough it was too late to get under control all of the untrained growth that had happened in 3 months.
We could have lost the whole crop; it’s that simple folks. And so an unbelievably massive MASSIVE thank you to those 300 or so volunteers that gave up their time to help us after our Facebook plea for extra pairs of hands. You saved the vines and you saved our year. Every bottle of wine we produce out of the 2020 harvest will bear the quote “A vintage year for kindness” (the strapline used by BBC News when they came to film the work of so many wonderful volunteers).
It was truly amazing to find that so many people were happy to help. xxx
We were past the business damage that Covid brought us…..or so we thought (like so many other businesses did, no doubt).
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We produce around 19,000 litres of wine a year, which means we need 25,000 bottles to put it in. Try doing that when the Italian bottle factories all shut down. When the factories did re-open, it was a bit piecemeal, and those bottles that were available got snaffled up by the world’s mass wine manufacturers!
The only bottles we can now get cost twice the price and arrive by lorry on pallets 2.5m high. Pallets stacked that tall require a lorry to deliver them that is far too big to get up our narrow driveway……. bugger!
So we had to buy a forklift truck and Russ had to go on a training course…. £10k down already, and we haven’t bought the flipping bottles yet!
Next challenge (we don’t have problems here)…….
So nobody is allowed to sit indoors anymore, at least not within close confines. This meant our little bistro had to go as we could only seat 15 people of unusually small stature anyway. Outside seating only from now on.
Hang on…. we only have a flat outdoor area big enough for 12 tables…… in comes the 5 tonne digger and “hey presto”; 150 tonnes of soil is gone and a new upper tier garden with six more garden benches miraculously appeared with no money spent - if only!!
Anybody need a wee? You’ll have to go inside and walk through the shop to find our single toilet. If it’s occupied, just join the queue right through the centre of the other customers buying wine……. oh, sorry, you can’t. Only one family at a time allowed…mmm tricky.
Don’t worry, we have a spare £8k we honestly didn’t know what to do with, so lets build two new toilet rooms with outdoor access and hot air hand dryers. Should we put a notice on the doors that says, “a pound for a poo”? Humphfffff
Surely that’s the end of it right?……….. WRONG.
You can’t take your mask off indoors if you are stood up, but you can’t sample wine with a mask on. So that is the end of our paid wine tasting lessons stood around the oak barrel, as well as the end of customers, “trying before they buy”.
Luckily, as we’ve all learned, you can sit in a restaurant without a mask because Covid is smart enough to know whether you are sat down or stood up; and you can’t catch Covid if you’re sat down. Thank goodness for that. Although not totally convinced on the logic behind this one, let’s apply best practice and say that if customers sit down they can sample our wine.
So now we just need to find another few thousand to build a seated wine tasting area separate from the main part of the shop. Excellent. Time to get the kids out on a paper round (or chimney sweeping).
Now speaking of paper…… where the hell did all the cardboard boxes go????? Thanks for that one Amazon and the rest of the huge mail order companies. Should we post the wine for our new ecommerce web site in carrier bags instead? FFS!
Oh yes!!!! And we had to have a new web site built in the hope we might still be able to sell some wine whilst the shop was in lockdown, go figure!
THE END
Well, almost the end. It’s competition time folks. The first visitor to enjoy their day looking at spectacular views and watching 2 hours of free live music that says, “you aren’t as cheap as Wetherspoons”, wins a dry slap and gets the rough end of a pineapple xxx.
