The Lockdown Harvest COVID-19 and Online Store Update
New Zealand has been in lockdown for just over a week.
Well, it’s been a week. We’re sure you’ve had an update from every business under the sun about what they’re doing during COVID-19, but we’ve got a little something extra for you! Make sure you stick around to the end of this post…
We’ve been doing a lot of thinking and behind-the-scenes work. For our overseas friends who haven’t heard, New Zealand is in lockdown – no moving around unless it’s for essential services. We’ve moved as many of our team as possible to working-from-home arrangements, and have been working hard on protecting the health and safety of those who can’t work from home. We’re also feeling very lucky and very grateful to be classified as an essential industry.
Throughout all this, the most critical time of year for the wine industry has been going on behind the scenes – harvest. Grapes were being picked across Marlborough when Alert Level 4 / Lock-down was announced, so our already hard-working team had double the challenge ahead of them. They’ve been going above and beyond to make sure this intense and critical time still comes together seamlessly. We completely readjusted our approach, to make sure we followed the government’s guidelines on how best to protect our teams. The health of our people comes first, so we’ve been busy putting precautions in place to ensure the risk to our team is absolutely minimal.
We thank you for your patience if we’ve been slower than usual to respond while we do this work. It’s not easy, but it’s absolutely essential to us that we look after our people. Which of course, also has us thinking about our friends and family at home too.
We’ve had a number of requests from people who are vulnerable to COVID-19. These are our friends and whanau who can’t risk visiting the supermarket – and who still want to enjoy a glass of wine (or dealcoholised wine!) during this very stressful and uncertain time. We completely understand and we’ve been looking at how we can help.
So, we’re pleased to announce that in partnering with a distributor operating under all Ministry of Health requirements, we’re able to take online orders within New Zealand during this period.
Things will be a little different than normal. Couriers are operating with no contact, so if you look under 25 and would therefore need to show ID to receive your parcel, we ask you to reconsider ordering during this period. We’re only taking orders by the case – that’s six 750ml bottles already boxed up, so we can give you the reassurance that staff don’t need to handle the bottles inside each case.
Please allow a few extra days when it comes to shipping and delivery time frames. The couriers are usually pretty quick, but we want to acknowledge their amazing work running to a very busy schedule during the present situation.
We’re committed to operating as safely as possible and serving our friends and family, without putting anyone at risk. And if we can help reduce the risk for you by minimising the amount you need to leave the house too, we’re glad to be able to help.
We’ve added a selection from the Giesen Estate through to our finer wines, which make for beautiful drinking now or can be put away for a rainy day. And finally, we have wheedled our way into a very limited number of cases of the brand new Giesen 0% – Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc. Take a look to see what’s available.