Ryan Oliver is warm, gentle, and often finds himself a watcher before he’s a participant. This episode goes behind that reserve: an OE that started with forensics and ended in a London events agency, four formative years at Deadshot under Ali and Heather, a stint running Caretaker that taught him as much about people as it did about cocktails, and where he’s landed now — Panacea’s batch-built, whisky-forward bar, where the focus is the welcome. Along the way: an annual pilgrimage back to a European fencing club, a hostel night in Vienna that turned into an impromptu spirits tasting, a Prague bartender baffled by the very idea of batching, and the vintage Manhattan that’s about to disappear from the menu because the vermouth ran out decades ago.

In this episode

• On learning bartending from Ali and Heather at Deadshot: the technical skill turned out to be secondary to learning how to get a guest to tell you what they actually want when they say “I don’t know.”

• On the difference between fresh service and batch service: it’s not a downgrade in craft, it’s a different lens — creativity moved from the guest’s hand guiding you in the moment to designing for a much wider frame beforehand.

• On travel: an annual fencing reunion in Europe going back to his OE years anchors a month of travel every year, built around visiting old teammates from Belgium, Spain, Italy and the US.

• On hospitality across cultures: the standout memory is a Hungarian father, house-sitting for his daughter’s hostel in Vienna, sharing four bottles of his own homemade spirit with a handful of strangers at midnight.

• On regulation: a Prague bartender’s disbelief that Panacea can batch and store cocktails at all — in the Czech Republic, mixing has to happen in view of a camera in the walk-in.

I interviewed Becs from Good Sh*t Soda on the podcast last week and it’s really had me thinking. Listen here to the Interview.

Remember when the idea of a functional drink was simple? It meant mainlining coffee or energy drinks until you got the jitters, perhaps a cup of sleepy tea and occasionally dropping a fizz-bomb Berocca or electrolytes into a glass of tap water. As we hit the 2000s, vitamin loaded water and smoothies loaded with extra green or ginger shots started to multiply in the drinks fridge. But now? Squeezing as much function as possible into everything that passes your lips is the food trend of the moment. Whether it’s the rise of GLP-1s and an incessant need for protein, or a symptom of the starving rich - we’re making every morsel of food over-deliver in nutrition. In the irony of the wellness age, UPFs (ultra-processed foods) are in high growth mode as we continually reach past the whole foods on our plate for a beverage that is loaded with added benefits.

You can’t ignore the GLP-1 effect

If you are a woman aged 30 - 55 years, according to those I know, we’re being targeted with GLP-1 ads, supplemental beverages and a variety of protein shakes, smoothies and everything-in-one-pouch ads every twice for every three minutes we spend on social media. Sure, it’s an anecdote but I woke up the other morning actually wondering, ‘is the Algorithm trying to sell to me or is it actually trying to heal me? Maybe I do need that (insert supplement here).”

If you’ve seen those ads, then you already know the wellness (cough, weightloss) world is all about protein and nutrientmaxxing, minimal calories and maximum input. GLP-1s tell your brain you’re full before you’ve actually eaten much. Appetite drops, portions shrink, and so does nutritional intake. Overseas, restaurants are running ‘smaller appetite’ or bariatric menus for patients, bars are shrinking drinks because of reduced alcohol tolerance. And one look at the beverage aisle tells you that if you’re eating less, everything you do eat or drink has to work harder.

In the US, GLP-1 usage climbed from 2% to 18% of the population from 2019 to 2026. It’s still climbing, and it’s about to get a lot bigger once oral GLP-1s and softer pricing bring the entry point down from eye-watering to merely expensive. To give you a reference point, in Australia and New Zealand, we are sitting right at 2% of the population and growing each month. So buckle up, because the drinks list is about to get to work.

Form and function

I cracked open a can of Good Sh*t Soda with co-founder Becs Caughey and the orchard-fresh apple aroma hits you upfront. It’s their newest flavour and it’s right on the money. Good Sh*t Soda has always obsessed over perfecting the nose as well as the palate, because the nose is what draws you in, regardless of whether you’re drinking it for your health.

For a long time, health drinks and fizzy were two different things. The treat lived in one fridge, the virtue lived in another, and you picked your fridge depending on the kind of day you were having. Soda, proper soda, belonged firmly to the treat fridge, a small bit of fun in a can. Nobody opened a Coke expecting it to do anything for their gut.

Now, you can open a can of Good Sh*t Soda Cola and feel just as refreshed, with the added benefit of knowing you’ve just put a ton of fibre into your gut. Which is important, if you’re needing more than just fun and flavour from your beverage choice.

Appetite-suppressing weight loss drugs are rewiring how a meaningful chunk of people experience hunger and think about constructing their daily macros. It’s not just personal, but the concept of appetite and nutrition is changing shape in public, in real time, in a way that will inevitably bleed into how large parts of the population eat and drink, based purely on how the food and beverage industry will change to absorb and meet this new version of a consumer. And that consumer wants their drinks to be more efficient at being good for us, in the same breath as wanting them to be more delicious than ever. Not instead of fun. As well as fun.

There’s another false wellness-morality creeping in too, I think. Particularly those of us sitting in the right demographic for the algorithm. We’ve stopped being satisfied with a drink that’s simply not bad for us and we’re increasingly programmed that everything needs to be doing something extra. Not just makeup, but skincare! Not just water, but added protein! It’s one more step in the 5am Club protocol or the 10-step Korean skin care routine.

Wellness used to mean restraint. Now it means more and more and more. More actives, more vitamins, more nutrients and powders. More performance, even in a can of fizzy. You’re choosing the version that’s supposed to be working on your behalf while you’re not looking, fixing something, building something, fending something off. That’s a lot to ask of 330ml of bubbles, and yet here we all are, asking it, and meaning it.

We’re Fizzy for Fizzy.

We’ve always had a soft spot for good soda that borders on the sentimental, the kind of loyalty that turns Foxton Fizz and Karma Cola into genuine institutions. Watching that same fizzy obsession quietly absorb a wellness brief, rather than get replaced by one, makes sense here. Especially when it suits our trademark cheeky humour with a ‘poop-on-the-can’ logo. But this isn’t about supplements dressed up in a soda can. I’m not sure anyone really wants to drink a supplement.The whole point of Good Sh*t, is that the fun and the function have to arrive in the same sip or it simply doesn’t hit the mark of what we want. You can have all the fibre and probiotics in the world sitting in that can and it will not matter one bit if the second sip isn’t just as fun and delicious as the first.

I’ve been saying this in booze for the last 18 months. The world is a pretty bonkers and occasionally dark place these days. And when people walk down the beverage aisle, the scan data tells us they are looking for fun, looking for fizzy and looking for approachable flavour. If it comes with a side of ‘oh, I can feel less bad about things’, that’s a real bonus. Most of the beverage aisle is having a hard run. Beer’s been soft for years now, RTDs are slowly correcting (which no-one is talking about), wine’s fighting for attention to grasp a new generation of drinkers. And then there’s this pocket of fun and functional drinks, that just keeps growing, here and overseas, while everything around it goes flat or backwards.

So no, this column isn’t really about appetite drugs, or gut bacteria, or any of the science-y stuff (although Good Sh*t are very careful to be transparent about the nutritional content only and to let you and your bathroom tell the impact story) sitting on the can.

For most of fizzy drink history, the job of a soda was singular: be a treat, taste good, full stop. Good Sh*t’s whole proposition rests on something Becs puts plainly: wellness doesn’t need to be beige. It doesn’t have to come in a powder. The question of why Fizzy-and-functional is the one growing pocket in this market begins to answer itself. It’s the fun part.

Fun-ctional.

Not all functional beverages are created equal. And if we’re honest, really, the idea of drinking our way to health is largely because it’s perceivably the easier option. Need your greens? Don’t eat them, that would take forever. Just put’em in a smoothie and sip them down.

There are plenty of examples of green powder, mood powder, protein powder, vitamin powder and even supplement powders promising to correct your hormones. Lots of them New Zealand owned and operated. Then there are the nootropic beverages (again, we’ll talk about what you can and can’t say on the label another time). But suffice to say, as long as all you put on the label is the nutrition content, you can imply almost anything else in your marketing. Of course, more powder = more processing. But powder seems to be the one UPF that everyone is okay with right now.

I think the closest to fun they get is the promise of a sleepytime hot chocolate. But that’s going to have a hard time competing with my nightcap, sorry. When it comes to competing for buzz, it ain’t cutting it.

Which brings me to the other functional beverages pushing growth offshore and unlikely to be viable opportunity for producers (or consumers) here anytime soon.

In the US and UK, CBD beverages sit on open shelves: hemp-derived, low-dose, parked next to the kombucha. You can’t buy a CBD soda or iced tea at a dairy in Auckland, and you can’t import one for personal use either. That’s a regulatory wall that appears pretty solid, despite substantial growth and research bases overseas. Proof we really are on the conservative side of innovators. Don’t get me wrong - I’ve roadtested a bunch of these and honestly, left me uninspired.

Mushroom and nootropic beverages are a different story and we’re maybe actually behind on. Lion’s mane for focus, reishi for stress, cordyceps for energy: overseas mushrooms are moving out of powder tins into ready-to-drink cans and shots at serious pace. There’s minimal regulatory hurdles and nobody’s built the definitive Australasian version of that category yet, it’s all still sitting on health store shelves or stalls at your local Fieldays or Home & Garden show. Maybe room for innovation? Maybe not. A month of mushie alternative coffee didn’t do much for me. Where’s the fun? Caffeine is fun.

So what

The deeper point here isn’t about a drug class, a social impact or that Good Sh*t is delicious. It’s not about who will be next to add a macro-nutrient to their fizzy (or their mushroom coffee). It’s not even about who will win commercially in the beverage aisle because there are so many functional beverage niches, there’s almost room for everyone. It’s more that hey, who can blame us for wanting a little fun and fizz in our health choices. If it means I don’t have to feel bad about that fizzy fridge cigarette, in fact, maybe I can feel a little bit good about it – then yeah. Tonight, I’m trading the broccoli.

And when I pour a whiskey-and-apple tonight, I will smile sweetly to myself that it came with added fibre.

In this episode:

• The origin story: a stalled shipping container, a tiny American brand and a decision to build something local

• Why the prebiotic fibre matters as much as the probiotic — “it’s like a dog with a bone”

• The science behind an ambient, non-refrigerated probiotic that “wakes up” on your tongue

• Designing a can that’s colour-blocked, uniform, and built to make the ingredient list the hero

• Apple flavour development: nostalgia, orchard-fresh aromatics, and getting the granny smith/braeburn balance right

• GLP-1 drugs, shrinking portion sizes, and what that’s doing to restaurant menus and bar pours overseas

• Why Good Sh*t makes zero claims on pack — and the food lawyer reality behind that decision

• Distribution: where to find it in NZ, and the early export push into Australia and Asia

Key topics

• Mark Teague’s whisky journey and connection to Tasmania

• The real history of distilling in Tasmania

• How Tasmanian whisky has matured and diversified

• Volume, cask strategy, and production changes

• Tasmanian Whisky Week and its signature events

• Community, tourism, and the culture around whisky lovers

Notable moments

• Mark explains how he became involved in Tasmanian whisky through events and tastings

• Tash and Mark unpack the myths around Tasmania’s whisky history

• The discussion turns to how distilleries are now building for scale and distinction

• Mark shares what makes Tasmanian Whisky Week such a unique destination event

• The episode closes with excitement around upcoming festivals, previews, and awards

Why listen

If you’re interested in whisky, Tasmanian food and drink culture, or how a regional industry builds identity over time, this episode offers a thoughtful and well-informed look at the people and ideas shaping the scene.

Mentioned in this episode

• Tasmanian Whisky Week

• Bill Lark

• Casey Overeem

• Sullivan’s Cove

• Belgrove

• Old Kempton

• Greenbanks

• Hunter Island

• Derwent Distillery

• Royal Agricultural Society of Tasmania

Devan’s path runs through Matterhorn and Hawthorne Lounge to name just a couple and a slice of iconic Wellington bartending compressed into one conversation. A business degree that didn’t finish. A Negroni he’d never heard of. A pact with a mate that turned into a career pivot.

They get into the ice. Specifically: why ice is the most important ingredient in any bar, what a Hoshizaki cube tilted just off-centre does to the drinking experience, and why Tash has never had a cold nose problem at Dee’s. From there: vermouth blending as house philosophy, the slow conversion of single malt loyalists to American whiskey, and what seasonal produce-led menus actually look like when you don’t have a rotovap.

Also: milk punch, the Remember the Maine, Chattanooga Bottled in Bond, and why the staffy drink is a Michelob Ultra. Maybe a whiskey. Depends on the weekend.

In this episode:

• How Matterhorn and Hawthorne shaped a generation of Wellington bartenders

• Why Dee’s was designed around the bar, not the tables

• Ice as the most considered ingredient in the glass

• The American whiskey conversion programme, and how rye is usually where it starts

• Seasonal menus without the fancy equipment

• On mentorship: teaching fundamentals without the kitchen militia energy

• Outstanding Bartender of the Year, and why it still comes back to service

Adam Chapman of Sunshine & Sons in Australia, joins the More Good Drinks Podcast to dive into his unique approach to rum distillation, safety, and education. With over 30 years in winemaking and a passion for teaching, Adam shares profound insights into spirit craftsmanship, sensory evaluation, and industry challenges.

Why Adam? Well - he has a unique ability to call a spade a spade, and an unerring drive for accuracy and understanding. There’s plenty here to examine by way of inspiration, attention to craft and just a good bloke having a bloody good time and trying to stay alive doing it.

He’s not afraid to call out what craft distillers could be doing better and to share his rich knowledge. So listen in, you’ll benefit.

In this episode:

• The transition from winemaking to rum distillation driven by climate change and a passion for spirits

• How wild fermentation and organic molasses create a full-bodied, muscular rum profile

• The importance of texture, mouthfeel, and structure in spirit evaluation and how Adam measures these aspects

• An overview of his innovative tasting scale from 1 to 5 across various characteristics

• His approach to blending, maturation, and experimenting with fermentation processes to develop signature styles

• The critical role of safety equipment, including pressure relief valves, in small-scale distilling

• Emphasizing industry safety, compliance, and the importance of education in spirits production

• Adam’s perspective on Australian rum’s potential and the influence of terroir

• The value of sensory education, understanding compounds, and how to communicate complexity to consumers

• Insights into his ongoing training contributions and plans to influence the industry positively

• The significance of respecting cultural traditions like Baiou and indigenous ingredients in spirit innovation

Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction: Rum innovation and Adam’s background

02:00 - Transition from winemaking to rum distillation

05:15 - Wild fermentation and organic molasses as signature elements

08:30 - Texture, structure, and sensory evaluation in spirits

12:45 - The unique tasting scale and scoring process

16:10 - Maturation styles and blending strategies

20:20 - Safety practices: pressure relief and distillation equipment

24:00 - Industry challenges and safety standards

28:30 - Australian rum: terroir and style evolution

33:20 - Cultural influences: Baiou and indigenous ingredients

39:00 - Education: training, sensory analysis, and industry standards

43:30 - Future trends and innovation in spirits

48:00 - Final thoughts and Adam’s passion for safety and education

In the world of drinks, for the better part of a decade, “made in New Zealand” or “made in Australia” functioned as a shortcut to premium. Provenance was positioning. The story of the place, the founder, the water source, the native botanicals — that was enough to put a $90 - $130 price tag on a bottle and expect it to move. And for a while, it worked, because consumers (we) were curious and the craft story was still novel.

That novelty has worn off.

Consumers haven’t become less interested in provenance — they’ve become more sophisticated about what it provenance actually means. Origin is a qualifier now, not a differentiator. It tells you something about what’s in the bottle; it doesn’t tell you why you should choose this bottle over the twelve others next to it on the shelf, several of which are also local, also handcrafted, also have a lovely founder story on the back label.

So when Meg Raynor, my former colleague in the big, bold world of brand, comms and marketing, gave a brilliant answer to the question of establishing value—I immediately asked if I could share it with you, as consumers and producers.

What Meg articulates here — and why I wanted to share it — is the thing sitting underneath that problem of value, especially in a cost-of-living crisis etc et al. Pricing is perception. Perception is built by everything a brand does, consistently, across every touchpoint, long before someone picks up the bottle. If your price says premium and your brand behaviour says uncertain, inconsistent, or just a bit beige and inauthentic, we feel the dissonance and mismatch even if we can’t name it. We put it back on the shelf.

If you’re looking for the TLDR; read this. Then read it again if you own a brand with a price tag you know you’re defending on the shelf.

Whatever your pricing is, has to be believable. If your pricing is premium, your brand had better be living up to it in every way.

In the drinks category specifically, “every way” means your bartender relationships, your off-premise shelf neighbours. Your social presence. The tone and consistency of your marketing comms. The way your rep shows up, if you have one. Whether you show up at all. The confidence — or lack of it — in how you talk about what you make. Consumers are reading all of it, all the time, and pricing it accordingly in their heads.

So enough from me (for now)… here’s another expert to help you navigate it and think about what you choose buy, why and what it means for your products.

Here’s why pricing is about the vibe

The price vs conversion conundrum.

Meg Raynor

May 17, 2026

This is all about PosITionINg baby ✨

In your question, you’ve said: “for the value something actually is”. The thing is, people don’t pay the price it actually takes to produce or do something. They pay what they think it is worth. In other words, they’re paying for perception, not objection.

And the way to create the perception is through brand positioning.

For the non-marketing inclined, positioning is what you decide you want your brand to be associated with – and everything you do to reinforce that association.

Positioning answers the question of why you choose one product over another, when underneath the branding, they’re probably the same. For example, Apple vs basically any technically comparable product.

Apple has positioned itself as sleek, premium and innovative. Top of the class. Especially for creatives.

They do this through branding, product experience (even the unboxing feels lush), marketing, visuals, tone of voice, education about their benefits/tech (v important), and the in-store experience. All elements work together to make the product feel premium and therefore worth the price.

Not to get confusing, but even their pricing is part of the positioning strategy - by pricing Apple products at a premium, it implies that they’re of high value. They don’t even do sales.

Whereas if they started pricing on the lower end, people would distrust the products. Cheap pricing can actively undermine a premium perception.

This is why two near-identical products can exist side by side with wildly different pricing, and both still sell. They’re targeting their positioning to different audiences, and having the price to suit.

To try to distil this down into one simple piece of advice, if your pricing is premium, your brand had better be living up to it in every way. (sidenote: including customer service, though I know the asker has this nailed, so this advice is for everyone else)

There’s actual research behind this, too. Kantar found that 49% of pricing power comes from positioning. As marketing professor of Mini MBA (p.s would recommend), Mark Ritson puts it, positioning “gives you the ability to charge more as we harvest that demand.”

In short, as soon as people can’t tell the difference between you and the cheaper option, price becomes the deciding factor.

And if the value of your product or service isn’t perceived before the purchase happens, OR your positioning is not aligned with the price you’ve got on it, it’s an issue.

Capiche?

P.S. Some people will never ever ever (ever!) see the value in your offer or product. They are not your audience; it’s not worth trying to convince them. They can choose another brand.

Right, back to me. (Yes, Meg and I do make a good team).

Summary + Practical Applications

Meg’s framework is clean: positioning creates perception, perception justifies price, and price that outstrips perception loses every time to the cheaper option once consumers can tell the difference has disappeared. Kantar’s finding that 49% of pricing power comes from positioning isn’t surprising if you’ve spent any time watching premium craft spirits struggle at retail while a globally recognised but non-premium brand sits comfortably at a lower price point and turns over steadily. Here’s the shock: it’s not just price point that means people are flooding back to mid-priced and mainstream products. It’s decades of consistent positioning and consistent performance. The decision-making becomes effortless.

So what does this look like practically, in the drinks context?

For starters, it’s not just your price that has to be believable, but your brand too. Your brand needs a personality that consumers can actually feel — not just a story, a personality. Whether it’s fun, irreverent, elegant, authoritative, warm, a bit provocative - preferably somehow it draws you into actual engagement. Something consistent enough that a consumer who’s had one interaction with you could predict how you’d behave in another context. The brands that are winning right now — and this is as true in Australasia as anywhere — are the ones that feel like a genuine relationship, not a transaction. Consumers want to be in on something. They want to feel like the brand chose them back.

It also means your price point needs a support structure. Premium pricing without premium execution at every touchpoint isn’t bold, it’s just expensive. And what producers perceive as valuable is often miles apart from what consumers care about. The lush wooden boxes left scattered in the backroom of duty-free are testament to the example. And in a market where consumers are making increasingly careful choices about where their discretionary spend goes, “expensive without a reason” is a fast track to dusty bottle shoulders on the shelf and a conversation with your distributor about margin support.

For brand owners: the diagnostic question isn’t “is our product good enough to justify this price?” It probably is, I hope. The question is whether a consumer who has never tasted it could tell that from every other signal your brand sends. The trouble is, most people don’t understand the cost of a barrel, but if you’re going to ask them to spend hundreds on aged spirit, you need them to believe something in that bottle is worth it. If the answer is uncertain, that’s where the work is.

I want to know — how does your favourite drinks brand make you feel? Is it the confidence of a brand that knows exactly what it is? The elegance of one that never has to try too hard? The sass of one that makes you feel slightly in on the joke? Tell me in the comments — and if you’ve got a brand that you think is genuinely nailing this, name them.

For brand owners: Honest question: does your positioning and brand behaviour match your price point at every touchpoint? Not just the liquid, not just the label. Everything. And if you’re never considered that question before and you want to think it through when positioning is more important than ever? You know where to find me. And I know where to find Meg too.

Dive into a compelling conversation with Mikey Ball, a product development expert at Woodward Street Distillery, as we explore what genuine innovation really means in the drinks industry. Discover how ancient techniques, authenticity, and storytelling shape truly original products, and learn practical insights on navigating the balance between tradition and modernity.

You’ll also hear a sneak preview of what he’s up to at Auckland Cocktail Week.

In this episode:

• The difference between copying techniques and building original flavors

• How ancient traditions inform innovative product development

• The importance of deep foundational knowledge and context

• Recognising superficial “innovation” versus true originality

• The role of storytelling and narrative in product positioning

• Examples of misleading terms such as “ultrasonic distillation”

• Authenticity as a marker of genuine innovation

• Practical approaches for elevating industry standards and consumer experiences

• The parallels between product creation behind the bar and in distilleries

• How to embed culture, technique, and authenticity into branding and packaging

In this episode:

• Evolution of advocacy and community engagement in the spirits industry over the past decade

• The importance of authentic, safe spaces for bartenders and trade and how to foster them

• The significance of education — from upskilling trade to empowering consumers

• Navigating the misconceptions around whiskey and diversity in the industry

• Addressing mental health, safety, and industry shifts towards healthier habits

• How societal changes influence drinking culture and social interactions

• Alice’s travel routines and personal rituals for grounding and recharge

• The future of hospitality: creating meaningful connections and community

This episode highlights the importance of authentic connection, ongoing advocacy, and the delicate balance between professional passion and personal well-being in the vibrant, demanding world of hospitality.

But first the big news: lots of award wins in for NZ distillers like Clarity, Awildian, Roots, Sandymount, Cardrona and Pōkeno… but right at a time when the fragile homegrown distilling industry is in more flux than ever before.

Tune in to celebrate our smash hit Kiwi success stories before the NZ awards season kicks off and learn all about Auckland Cocktail Week, coming up June 22 - 28th.

There’s plenty to be optimistic about for those of us who love celebrating the best of the industry.

Connal Mackenzie has been Sales Director at Ardnamurchan and Adelphi for eight years. He was in the warehouse the fortnight they didn’t see daylight, picking the casks that became the inaugural single malt. He came through Christchurch last week, back to the country his daughter holds a passport in, back to Whisky Galore where he used to work before he went home to Scotland. We sat down at the Howff to talk about adventures in whisky.

Ardnamurchan is four hours from Edinburgh. Four hours from Glasgow, four hours from Inverness. “Ardnamurchan is four hours from Ardnamurchan,” Connal says, because anyone who’s driven the single-track road out to the peninsula understands what exactly what the geography means and costs. But it also gives back in delightful ways. Lorries come and go on roads really better suited for sheep. Power, when it goes, doesn’t come back quickly.

What the geography gives back is the freedom to start the way you intend to continue. Ardnamurchan started distilling in 2014, released their inaugural single malt in 2020 (listen for more shared trauma). We talk about pricing and structures for understanding earning trust with whisky lovers.

Twelve years in, the things they decided early are the things that now look prescient. Solar in the warehouse, hydroelectric off the river, a Swiss biomass boiler that cost 1.2 million pounds and is quietly delivering a cost-per-litre of alcohol that’s, in Connal’s words, “maybe quite sharp” compared to the rest of the field during an oil crisis. He isn’t boasting but you can’t help noting that the ROI on a sustainability decision made for the right reasons in 2013 looks different in 2026. A clipboard person told them last year they could go off-grid if they wanted to. For a site Ardnamurchan’s size, that’s an extraordinary achievement.

The blending team is made up of four or five noses across different backgrounds: a single Master Blender can be a brand asset, a face and a consistency of vision, and that’s a real thing. It’s also a narrow filter on what gets into a bottle. The committee model is less heroic but it produces whisky that passes the compounding demands of groiup assessment, which is what you want when you’re trying to become someone’s third bottle on the shelf after their favourite Islay and their favourite Speyside. That’s Connal’s stated ambition for the brand. The reliable Highland coastal dram that needs replacing when it runs out.

We talk about cask provenance in one of the most interesting cask programmes currently operating. Most distillery sales directors, asked about cask provenance, will give you the line. Connal gave the actual breakdown. Around 75 to 80 per cent of fills are ex-bourbon, mostly from Old Forester, direct relationship. Sherry casks come direct from Jerez, one of the best suppliers plus a small bodega, bought in Spain and not (and this is the aside that earns its keep) imported via France, which apparently is a thing some distilleries now do because the maths works out and the geography evidently doesn’t matter to them. Paul Lanois Champagne casks, fifteen to twenty-five barriques a year, bought direct from the family.

Port, Madeira, Mizunara, Tokaji, Mezcal. They know the cooperages and the people moving the wood, as much as possible. But we’re also in a long, gentle inflection where transparency to that degree isn’t something we talked about as aggressively twenty years ago.

This matters because the new-distillery marketing playbook of the last decade has been to lean very hard on provenance language while quietly running the same broker calls everyone else runs. Ardnamurchan saying “we have direct relationships on the casks where we have direct relationships, and we don’t pretend on the ones where we don’t” is a more useful kind of transparency.

Cask costs, while we’re here. Bourbon barrels peaked at 250 US dollars last year and Connal calls that frightening, rightly. The relief, eight years in, is that Ardnamurchan is now reaping the second-fill, third-fill, sometimes fourth-fill yields off the casks they bought in the early years.

The 2020 balloon, and what it cost the industry to mistake it for growth

If there’s a single argument worth carrying out of the conversation, this is it. Connal and the Adelphi team were in Christchurch for Dramfest in March 2020, then crossed to Australia. Cancelled cricket games, a phone call from the chairman, last flight out via Dubai, house-bound for two and a half months. Standard 2020.

What happened next is what matters. Furlough money, locked-down consumers, bored, cashed-up. Every new release sold out instantly, anything new an instant seller, anything new an instant seller. The entire industry read those numbers as a category in ascent. It wasn’t. It was a balloon.

The reasonable thing, and Connal’s word here is “potentially”, would have been to base next year’s gross-profit forecast on 2019, not on the spike. Plenty of brands didn’t. Plenty built capacity, built inventory, built marketing budgets and crowdfunding rounds against numbers that were never going to repeat. Then Brexit landed for the UK side. Then two wars affected barley pricing and freight. Then UK duty went up twice. Sure, the calculation shifts at different volumes and price points, and global premium-spirit demand isn’t dead. But for a lot of mid-range single malt brands trading on that 2020-21 hockey stick, the curve they’re now trying to explain to a board is the curve of a normal year against an abnormal comparable. That’s a different conversation than a downturn, it’s a correction.

Ardnamurchan kept production flat. Same volume they made three years ago, same volume they made last year. The bet is that there’s a stock lull eight to ten years out and the boring decision to keep distilling through the wobble pays off then. Whether that’s right is unknowable. What’s defensible is that the call was made on what was actually happening in 2020, not on what the spreadsheet wanted to be true.

Price discipline, in a category that’s lost its head about price

Forty-five pounds in 2020. Two and a half UK duty increases later, still under fifty quid. Ninety-nine dollars on the shelf at Whisky Galore. No relabelling, no relaunching, no “now with extra story” repricing.

For a category that has spent five years aggressively premium-positioning everything in sight, including a lot of nine-year-old single cask releases priced like they’re surely crafted from solid gold, Ardnamurchan’s pricing discipline is … disciplined. The proposition is liquid to dollar. The bet is that a drinker who buys the bottle at a reasonable price three times comes back for the cask-strength, comes back for the Tokaji release, comes back for the Mezcal cask when it lands. Loyalty is built on the second purchase, not the first.

Most of the loud premium-launch playbook of the last few years has been built on the opposite assumption. Extract margin on the first bottle because there might not be a second. The honest answer is what Ardnamurchan has done, which is run the core range honestly and let the limited releases (quarterly, 8,500 bottles across 48 markets, gone fast) do the storytelling.

What he’s drinking

Ardnamurchan Cask Strength, when he reaches for his own stuff. The new Tokaji, which has “real funkiness to it” and lands here in the next couple of months. And outside whisky, because anyone who works whisky knows you don’t always pour whisky on a Friday, a Negroni with Old Raj Navy Strength gin from Cadenhead’s at 55.4 per cent, because if you’re making a Negroni you may as well really make one.

Listen to the whole chat for a solid dose of whisky business, banter and Scottish brogue.

There’s a particular pleasure in the slow drink. The one you sip before dinner, or after, or sometimes instead of dinner but with copious amounts of charcuterie. The bottle on the back bar with a label you don’t quite recognise. The vermouth poured neat over a single big cube of ice, with a twist of orange. This is the world of aperitivo and amaro — bitter, herbal, wine-based, spirit-based, sweet, dry, weird, traditional — and it is one of the most genuinely people & place corners of the drinks landscape.

It’s also a world New Zealand has been building, quietly and with real craft, for longer than many people realise. I’ve tasted my way through a lot of what’s being made here over the last few years: winemakers, distillers and brewers approaching this category from their own angles, using native botanicals, local fruit and giving small-batch attention that produces drinks you won’t get anywhere else in the world. I champion the people making these bottles, and I champion the consumers who fall for them — because the more curious we are at the back bar and the bottle shop, the more producers can keep making interesting things.

Which is why I couldn’t wait to invite Jules van Costello to share his own passion and expertise with you. Jules has spent seven years making his own vermouth, and he’s now pulled together the first event in the country dedicated to celebrating the breadth of what’s being produced here. If you’ve ever wondered what a New Zealand vermouth might actually taste like — or if you didn’t know they existed — read on.

— Tash

Aotearoa Vermouth is something to be proud of…

Vermouth, a key ingredient in some of the world’s most iconic cocktails, has been overlooked for too long, with even highly experienced bartenders using the same handful of imported ingredients almost interchangeably. Aperitivo Aotearoa is here to change that… And don’t even get me started on bars storing vermouth unrefrigerated.

As well as a cocktail ingredient, vermouth is a phenomenal drink on its own or simply mixed with soda or tonic. As a low ABV option it thrives and aligns well with industry trends. For example, a 50ml pour of 16% vermouth is about 0.6 standard drinks, considerably less than half the alcohol that is in a 12% 150ml glass of wine or a 5% can of beer.

For context, I have been making vermouth for about seven years and since covid we have seen interest in the product skyrocket. While I’ve done my best as a self-proclaimed vermouth evangelical, most of the time I’m trying to convince people (consumers and professionals) to drink my vermouth, where Aperitivo Aotearoa is more about looking at New Zealand produced examples of these drinks more broadly and showcasing both the quality and diversity of these amazing beverages. As a world class producer of both wine and spirits, there is no reason New Zealand shouldn’t be proud consumers of beverages that combine these components.

That’s why I drove Aperitivo Aotearoa as a project. It was originally conceived around 2023 and it has taken a lot of collaboration and patience to get there, with the first event happening in a couple of weeks in Auckland on the 27th of May at Panacea Bar. Don’t worry, we’re already planning a Wellington event!

Showcasing the quality and diversity of New Zealand Vermouth, Aperitifs (largely wine-based ones) and other similar drinks (we’ll also have Vino Amaro, Sherry-styles and more), it features seven producers of these fantastic beverages (my guess is there are about a dozen producers making these regularly). Most of the producers are either wineries that dabble in vermouth, however there are also distilleries, breweries and even a dedicated vermouth producer taking part.

Like vermouth generally there is also a huge range of styles from relatively traditional expressions which clearly resemble the classic named-brand vermouths of Italy and France to new-world vermouths with vibrant, intense flavour that are often inspired by the creativity and innovation that comes from brewing and distilling. As well as recognisable international styles, many producers are also using native NZ botanicals to make vermouths and aperitifs that are wonderfully terroir-driven and could only ever be made here in New Zealand.

What should you expect from Aperitivo Aotearoa?

First off it’s a chance to taste 15+ products from some of the best producers in New Zealand to discover what you like and what makes craft vermouth and aperitifs different from mass market ones. You’ll also get to talk to the producers to discover how they make these products and how they can best be enjoyed. You’ll also get to meet and chat with other vermouth and aperitif lovers, enjoy food matched to the vermouths and you’ll be able to finish up the event with a vermouth based cocktail made by the amazing Panacea team.

The event starts at 5pm on Wednesday 27 May and all of the producers (and the Panacea team) would love to see you there. Tickets are $40 (+booking fee) and are available on Humanitix. If you work in the trade there is an event earlier in the day, email me wine@knownunknown.co.nz for a trade registration link.

The seven producers

144 Islands (Auckland / Bay of Islands) — Winemaker Jake Dromgool works from a vineyard planted 300m above sea level in the hills outside Kerikeri, farmed organically and without irrigation. His vermouth range is the closest thing in New Zealand to a literal taste of place: Vermouth #1 is built on Sauvignon Blanc, Sauvignon Gris and Chardonnay, fortified with distillates of Kerikeri lemon, kawakawa, kūmarahou, tarata, mānuka and kānuka flowers; Vermouth #2 uses a Syrah base infused with Kerikeri orange, tōtara, kahikatea, matai, kauri and northern rātā — essentially Puketi forest in a glass. There’s a rosé-based floral #3 and a coastal Vermentino #4 with horopito, olive wood and kelp. Hyperlocal.

Duncan’s Brewing Co (Kāpiti) — A brewery best known for pastry stouts, raspberry-ripple sours and a Japanese yuzu lager taking up bench space at a vermouth event might raise an eyebrow, but it shouldn’t. Duncan’s has spent a decade making it their whole personality to drag flavour out of unexpected places, and the same instincts of layered sweetness, big aromatics, no fear of the ridiculous translate naturally to aperitivo. If you want to see what happens when brewing brains get loose with botanicals and fortified wine, this is your stop.

Known Unknown (Taranaki) — My own project. A garagiste winery in Ngāmotu New Plymouth working exclusively with organic grapes since 2023, wild-fermented, unfined, unfiltered, minimal sulphur. Vermouths and aperitifs sit alongside the wines as part of the same lo-fi philosophy: process the fruit intuitively, let it tell you what it wants to be. Honey It’s Thyme dry vermouth is the one most trade people have come across; there’s usually something more experimental in the cellar door on rotation.

Mr Mug Sweet Vermouth (Auckland) — New Zealand’s first business solely dedicated to vermouth. The sweet red is built on Hawke’s Bay Pinot Gris, infused with mugwort, wormwood and chamomile, sweetened with local honey. Cleanly traditional in shape, distinctly Aotearoan in detail.

Mount Edward Winery (Central Otago) — The original. Mount Edward made what they (and most of the industry) credit as the first commercially produced new-wave vermouth in New Zealand, inspired by a trip to the Rootstock natural wine fair in Sydney. The current expression is Riesling and Chenin Blanc based, dry, with the dominant note being elderflower picked from the gardens at Felton Road. Organic, restrained, and a useful reference point for what wine-led vermouth made by people who actually know wine looks like.

Reid + Reid (Martinborough) — Brothers Stew and Chris Reid have been making gin in Martinborough since 2015, and their vermouths are essentially what happens when distillers approach the category. The dry is built by blending their native gin with Wairarapa Chardonnay and aging it in French oak with 13 botanicals including kawakawa and horopito. The red uses 100% Martinborough Pinot Noir, aromatised with a longer list — wormwood, manuka, horopito, juniper, star anise, orris and angelica root. Recommended use case: a New Zealand Martini that doesn’t taste like a compromise.

Terra Sancta (Central Otago) — Bannockburn pinot specialists with some of the oldest vines in the sub-region. Their Aperitivo Botanical is built on Central Otago Pinot Gris with sixteen botanicals — kanuka, horopito, rosehip, elderberry, yarrow, thyme, sage, hawthorn, artichoke — fortified to 18.5% and built around a bitter-orange backbone. The shorthand is “Aperol-esque” but that undersells it; this one has more depth, more energy, and is the closest thing in the country to a serious answer for a properly NZ Spritz

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About the author

Jules van Costello is the ringleader behind Aperitivo Aotearoa and is the wine and vermouth maker at Known Unknown, a garagiste winery based in Ngāmotu New Plymouth that is known for its fun, delicious, organic and lo-fi wine, vermouth and aperitifs. He is a vermouth evangelical and semi-retired drinks writer, having penned three books about wine and beer in New Zealand. As well as working in his own business he helps hospo, food and beverage businesses get the most out of their digital marketing budgets.

Woven Whisky landed back in New Zealand last month — second time around, but this in 700ml bottles. We sat down at the tail end of his trip home to talk about what’s actually happening underneath the hood and making blended whisky such an exciting place to make whisky right now: the structural argument that makes blending — proper, contemporary, world-spanning blending — the format that meets the moment the industry is in.

Because whisky is genuinely strange right now.

“There was an upswing in the purchasing of bottles,” Ravenhall says of the bubble, “but I don’t think there was the upswing in consumption to keep consuming all the extra bottles that people were buying.”

Somewhere around 2012, Scotch — and then much of new world whisky riding the same wave — started being a thing you bought, collected and talked avbout more than you drank it. Cask releases stacked on cask releases. Small batches stacked on small batches. New releases every month, each one as collectable as the last. China running hot on Western premiumisation. Then COVID struck, where everyone went home and bought the bottles they’d been meaning to try, just to pass the time.

And the whisky makers, beholden to forecasts built on all of that purchasing, kept making.

What no one had clean data on was whether any of it was being drunk. Sales reports showed movement. You know I talk about this a lot. Depletion reports — the actual re-orders, the rotation through retail, the second and third bottle bought by the same household — were a different story.

“All you have to do is see a new release and just scroll down the commentary,” Ravenhall says, on where customers landed. “They’re like, not another blah, blah, blah, blah.”

The current correction isn’t really a whisky problem but there’s definitely a trust problem with whisky pricing among enthusiasts. Value for dollar dram videos flood YouTube. Customers haven’t stopped drinking. They haven’t even stopped seeking out the unicorn bottles, but the promise on the label has to land in the glass.

Which is where Woven, offers an incredibly well-timed offer to the market.

“As a blender,” Ravenhall says, “we have the extreme privilege of not being distillers.”

A distiller wanting to try something has to make it, fill a cask, and wait three years minimum, six or seven before the liquid does what they hoped. A blender can buy something today and put it in a glass tomorrow. No three-year capital lockup on every experiment and no forecast built on whisky futures, in a world where value continually goes up.

What that unlocks, when you do it well, is a flavour proposition no single distillery can offer. Pure Malt, the blend Ravenhall and I tasted through, takes a Sherry-led Speyside heart and layers it with single malts from Starward in Australia, Kavalan in Taiwan, Paul John in India.

“If you as a customer wanted to experience those three other things, you’re going to be buying three other bottles at north of $100. Are you going to do that? Not ever.”

For a while now, blends got left on the bottom shelf at the UK’s Tesco for £18, while every distiller and their distributor chased the cask-strength single malt premium. The category that is actually solved a price-and-discovery problem for the modern customer was the category nobody was really paying attention to.

Woven came into being in the gap.

Sure, three washed-up bartenders — Nick’s words, not mine — turning up to blend at the level Scotch holds blenders to is a high bar. The first couple of years, he says, were just figuring out whether it could work at all. The next couple were realising they had to change how it worked. They’re five years in. Operationally, they now know how to land a price point on the shelf the customer is happy to pay, and then they over-deliver on experience. They’ve moved from single blended expressions to stamping their confidence and hard-won customer trust into a core range.

“It’s just a fucking simple equation,” Ravenhall says. “Respect your customer. Put a price on the shelf they’re happy to pay. Make sure you keep your whisky promise. Make something that surprises and delights them.”

Ravenhall is candid that the rules-and-regulations approach Scotch has used to police itself for two centuries — the SWA, the sensory panels, the Appellation discipline — has almost nothing to teach New World whisky makers. He’d know. He was running Holyrood when SWA put a Rauchmalt-distilled spirit through a blind sensory panel to determine whether birch-smoked malt could legitimately be called single malt. (It could, in the end.) But that machinery exists to protect a 200-year-old category from itself. Trying to retrofit it onto Australasian or Nordic or Taiwanese whisky-making is not going to help.

“Stop trying to make rules and regulations to gather in your whisky-making,” he says. “We’re all too early in the process.”

The implication is bold, but is worth some consideration. New World makers who treat Scotch as the template — the rules, the price ladder, the cask-release cadence, the founder-as-hero marketing — are competing on Scotch’s terms in a market Scotch already owns the high ground in. The interesting move is to do the things Scotch doesn’t do.

Blend across borders. Build a flavour proposition that isn’t tied to a single still. Tell the customer what they’re actually getting. Charge them what it’s worth. Land on the shelf at a price that lets them say yes.

Whether the rest of the category catches up to that argument is a different conversation. Some of it will. Some of it won’t survive long enough to.

The full conversation with Nick Ravenhall — including how a job at Cragganmore turned into Holyrood turned into Woven, why he passed his business card across the desk at Blair Athol like a crazed antipodean fanboy, and what it feels like to ship whisky home and watch your mum run out of it — is on the More Good Drinks podcast now.

Photo by Pieter Janaldo on Unsplash

Do you remember your first Rum’n’Coke? Overdo the Coruba at a Scarfies party one time? We’ve been a rum nation since way back when the Bay of Islands was still a hellhole of Pacific trading—and the consumption numbers suggest nothing much has changed. But NZ craft producers seem convinced the market isn’t ready for them. So I’ve been searching for a cultural landmark, a navigational waypoint to understand why Kiwis love rum but according to some, just not in the right way.

I can’t remember tasting rum for the first time. I can’t remember my first rum and Coke, can’t remember the first time I ordered a sipping rum in a bar, can’t tell you which bottle taught me what rum was supposed to taste like. Rum has been ubiquitous in my life in the way that fish’n’chips, sandy toes or the smell of mānuka bush in full summer is. It was always there. Which is why I feel friction every time a New Zealand rum maker tells me we don’t have a rum culture yet.

There is. There absolutely is. It’s just not the rum culture they’re trying to sell into. But rather than get into an argument, I have turned my attention to curiosity, research and discovery. Mostly in the hopes of redeeming the Pacific rum drinker and the glorious wonder of a great Rum’n’Coke. Because from botanical rum to unique sugar to experimental ferments, we’ve got a treasure trove of makers doing fascinating things with rum but for the most part, Kiwis love Caribbean flavour. So whether it is simply price, market penetration or the dastardly product-market fit, I want to understand, then crack the rum code. Like pirate code but tastier.

I’m not the only one stuck on the same kind of perplexion. A New Zealand producer told me recently that the local drinker isn’t sophisticated enough yet — that the category needs the consumer to ‘grow up’. An Australian producer told me, in the same fortnight, that of course New Zealand can’t have a rum culture, because we don’t grow the organic material. Two different countries, two different theories, both pointing at the same supposed deficit. And both, I’ve come to think, reading the wrong map.

I’ve been pulling at this thread for about nine months. What I keep coming back to is this: we have a rum culture. It’s just some don’t like that it’s focused on imported Caribbean products that are highly approachable (we’d prefer more complexity and sophistication), affordable (produced often in very large scale vs ‘craft’ producers) and often come in a can. We wrestle with that version of our rum-drinking identity while missing the historical and authentic one on our doorstep. There is no need to create a NZ rum story because the older, authentic and historical Pacific rum story already exists.

The rum culture we don’t want to admit we have

Walk through the shared memory of any Australasian drinker over thirty and you’ll find rum sitting in the foundations. Bundaberg & ginger or Coruba & Coke at the work BBQ. Malibu and pineapple on someone’s deck, the bottle going soft in the sun. Coruba in the hip flask, in the Christmas cake, in the Black Heart bottle your grandfather kept in the cupboard for reasons nobody questioned. The Bundy bear staring out from every duty-free shelf between Auckland and Brisbane. A generation of school socials that ran on Bacardi. A whole RTD aisle that is, when you read the back of the can, mostly rum doing the structural work.

This is a rum culture, dressed as something else — summer, holiday, party, fishing trips. Then we built a craft conversation that quietly assumed none of this counted, because the bottles didn’t have provenance stories and the drinkers didn’t ask for them. The drinker who has Black Heart in the freezer isn’t unsophisticated. They have a relationship with the category. It’s the producer’s relationship with that relationship that might be missing. Product designers don’t wait for consumers to meet the category, they design for the consumer existing in the category.

I was sitting with Kelvin Soh recently — who led the iconic brand development for Stolen Rum — and was reminded how cleanly that brand solved the problem the rest of the category keeps tripping over. Stolen didn’t pretend over it’s rum origin. The provenance is on the label, honest about where the spirit comes from. What it claimed instead was a New Zealand relationship with rum — irreverent, urban, designed for the way people here actually drink the category rather than the way modern producers wished they would. That’s a brand built on the rum culture we already have, not the one we keep apologising for not having. Best Behaviour have done a different version of the same move with manuka and the off-the-beaten-track adventure vibe. The category isn’t broken everywhere. It’s just stuck in the places where the story still hasn’t landed.

Which brings me to the part of the thread I keep pulling on. If Stolen got the honesty right at the brand layer, the next move is the honesty about geography.

A different map

This is, in part, a history story as much as a geography lesson. Rum was the first spirit consumed, traded, and produced in the Pacific and Australasia at any meaningful scale — it moved through these waters with whalers and sealers and missionaries, paid the labour of the cane plantations, and crossed every frontier the colonial period opened up.¹ It is, hellhole as that colonial history was — Charles Darwin used precisely that phrase about Kororāreka in the Bay of Islands² — the spirit with the deepest commercial footprint in this region. Soon may the Wellerman come, to bring us sugar and tea and rum. That’s a New Zealand whaling song. The shore stations at Tory Channel and Cloudy Bay and Otago paid their crews in slops and tobacco and rum, not cash.³ In Sydney, the New South Wales Corps ran the colony on rum as currency for the better part of two decades and staged a military coup over it in 1808.⁴ To pretend rum is a foreign category we’re trying to import a culture for is to ignore a documented lineage that runs through the ports of Sydney, the Bay of Islands, Lautoka and Apia. The footprint and our rum-drinking heritage is written on a map, with more depth than a geological survey.

If we keep asking whether New Zealand can be a rum country, we keep arriving at the same dead ends — no significant sugarcane, no heritage, no consumer pull-through. But that’s a local perspective on what is historically and structurally a regional category. Rum has always been regional—The Caribbean isn’t the only rum region on the planet. It’s the one we’ve been told to compare ourselves to. The Pacific is a rum region. Sugarcane is, in fact, Pacific in origin — domesticated in New Guinea around eight thousand years ago and carried across the ocean by Austronesian voyagers long before it was loaded onto European ships.⁵ Fiji’s commercial rum distillery, opened in 1979, sits on top of a much older sugar economy that ran more than thirty mills at its nineteenth-century peak.⁶ Samoa, Tonga, the Cook Islands all have cane traditions in depth. The Queensland cane belt runs straight down into Bundaberg, the largest rum producer in the southern hemisphere.⁷ The geography we’re actually part of is tropical and sub-tropical, anchored in the Pacific, with deep heritage. Sure, we’re at the temperate southern edge of it, but it’s still ours.

The temperate edge, and what it might mean

The technical part of this rum identity hypothesis is where I’m most confident. Tropical rum loses 7 to 10 percent of the barrel to the angels every year. New Zealand maturation runs at 2 to 3 percent anecdotally.⁸ Slower oxidation, longer playing time on the wood, different ester development. A Pacific rum category with regional variation would have Fijian heat-aged, Samoan tropical, Australian sub-tropical, and New Zealand temperate sitting alongside each other in conversation, but with better sub-branding. The way Scotch has Islay and Speyside. The way Cognac has Grande and Petite Champagne.

Inside that frame, the New Zealand role gets coherent for the first time. We’re a cool-climate maturation house at the slow end of a fast region. There’s opportunity for brand strategy in that, a sourcing story about Caribbean rum loved at the edge of the world, an export logic, and a tasting note all at once. It also means the producers here could start participating in a regional category conversation that already has scale and depth. In whisky, I’m studying the arid climates and the impact on ferments and maturation across the Outback and the dry Central Otago alpine ranges. In Pacific rum, the same conversations and threads regarding aging and ferment impact exist.

What I’m testing, and who I’m asking

I’m not convinced you build a category like NZ or Pacific Rum from a technical basis. It starts with the brand positioning of history, geography and authenticity. With the relationship I have with occasion and the places I reach for that familiar sweet and vibrant flavour. The line between recognising we’re part of a Pacific rum geography and aestheticising Pacific identity for shelf appeal is real, and not one to get wrong. But it is authentic to embrace and understand the rich and toruble heritage of rum in each corner of our region. Queensland has history but so do Northlanders. And history goes hand in hand with culture.

So this is an invitation to the hypothesis, on the page, while I’m still working it out. Rum culture in New Zealand isn’t missing. It’s been misnamed, misunderstood and sometimes diminished just because it doesn’t look as “sophisticated” as the craft branding coming out of more traditional regions. Some of those producers are actively building brands built on rebellion against tradition. Is it just we’re not comfortable living with the terrible colonial rambuctious past in our brand stories? We’re bouncing between no tradition and trying to create one. The story we should be telling has been on our doorstep the whole time. The producers who’ve already cracked the brand layer — Stolen, Rum Co of Fiji — show that the category responds when somebody actually tells it straight.

If you’ve been thinking adjacent to this — producer, distiller, buyer, trade person, anyone — I want to hear from you. This is my hypothesis and from here, I think there’s great discussion to be had about what and who is the Pacific rum drinker, lover and producer.

References

1. For the broader history of rum as colonial currency and trade good, see Ian Williams, Rum: A Social and Sociable History of the Real Spirit of 1776 (Nation Books, 2005), and the Oxford Bibliographies entry on rum in Atlantic history: https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780199730414/obo-9780199730414-0155.xml

2. Charles Darwin’s “hellhole of the Pacific” description of Kororāreka, recorded during his 1835 visit, is widely cited in New Zealand colonial history. See Te Ara — The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, “Ship-based whaling”: https://teara.govt.nz/en/whaling/page-1

3. On payment of New Zealand shore whalers in rum and other goods, and the origins of the Wellerman song, see Te Ara — The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, “Sealers and whalers”: https://nzhistory.govt.nz/culture/pre-1840-contact/sealers-and-whalers; and “Pohatu-koko and the Whalers”: https://www.cplay.co.nz/stories/detailed-stories-to-share/23-pohatu-koko-and-the-whalers

4. On rum as currency in early New South Wales and the 1808 Rum Rebellion, see State Library of New South Wales, “The 1808 Rum Rebellion”: https://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/stories/1808-rum-rebellion; National Museum of Australia, “Governor William Bligh is deposed in the Rum Rebellion”: https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/rum-rebellion; and Matt Murphy, Rum: A Distilled History of Colonial Australia (2021).

5. On the New Guinea origin of Saccharum officinarum and its Austronesian distribution across the Pacific, see CIRAD, “The origin of sugarcane revealed” (2025): https://www.cirad.fr/en/press-area/press-releases/2025/origin-of-sugarcane-revealed; and University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Library, “Sugarcane — Traditional Pacific Island Crops”: https://guides.library.manoa.hawaii.edu/paccrops/sugarcane

6. On Fiji’s nineteenth-century sugar economy and the establishment of South Pacific Distilleries (now Rum Co. of Fiji) in 1979, see Single Cask Rum, “Fiji”: https://singlecaskrum.com/countries/fiji/; and TDC Fiji, “Rum Fiji”: https://tdcfiji.com/rum-fiji.html

7. On Bundaberg and the Australian rum industry, see National Geographic, “The complex history of Australian rum — and the best places to find it”: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/history-best-rum-distilleries-australia

8. On angels’ share figures across tropical and temperate maturation climates, see Drinks International, “Aged rum: Devil’s in the detail”: https://drinksint.com/news/fullstory.php/aid/11218/Aged_rum:_Devil_92s_in_the_detail.html; Ethimex, “How Climate Affects Rum Ageing”: https://www.ethimex.com/knowledge-articles/how-climate-affects-rum-ageing-the-art-and-science-of-maturation/; and NM Spirits Consulting, “Why Are There 40-Year-Old Whiskies but Few Aged Rums?”: https://www.nmspiritsconsulting.com/en/why-are-there-40-year-old-whiskies-but-few-aged-rums-copy

To distribute or not to distribute, that is the question. Well, actually it’s not—it’s an imperative for any business wanting liquid on lips. Today, I’m exploring a common misconception for small craft brands: that distributor margin is something you give away rather than a savvy investment.

For most businesses I work with or advise, I prefer a distribution model. It usually means the right people with the right skills are doing the right job. While it’s not for everybody, it actually makes sense, and eventually cents, for most.

Somewhere right now, in the post EOFY clean-up, a a small distillery owner is justifying why they don’t use a distributor. They’ve got stockists, they’ll tell you. They’ve got cellar door footfall. They’re direct-to-consumer, they ship nationally, and they’ve done it all without giving their margin away to some middleman who’d only slow them down.

If they are moving their required product volumes and hitting profitability targets, try to buy the business plan, it’s surely crafted from solid gold.

The belief that running your own distribution is somehow saving your margin is one of the most expensive misconceptions in craft spirits. Not because distributors are saints. They’re businesses, and some are better than others. But the core misconception measures the wrong thing against the wrong alternative. The margin you’re not giving away isn’t landing in your pocket. It’s only giving you a stripped-down version of a sales function you can’t afford to build properly.

In a year when tariffs, freight, fuel and excise are squeezing every bottle that moves, the question of what a proper sales engine costs, and what it takes to build one with or without a distributor, matters more than ever. Because you must build one, and keep it fine-tuned no matter which model you invest in.

Most of the time, when a business says they don’t want a distributor, the underlying argument isn’t really commercial. Australasia is too geographically vast for spirits brands to maintain credible sales relationships without distribution support in one for or another. So it’s an argument about identity, control and perceived profit lines. You built this thing yourself, surely you deserve the biggest slice of the margin. I understand that, and respect it. But you have to be honest about what you’re choosing, because identity and commercial strategy aren’t the same conversation.

THE $200,000 QUESTION

What does it cost to run an effective sales function in New Zealand, one that actively manages the number of accounts required to hit your volume and revenue targets? More than most producers ever calculate.

Start with the rep on the road. A competent NZ spirits rep with real on- and off-premise relationships sits at $75,000 to $80,000 base salary. Commission at 2–10% of revenue, blended across volume and value, could add $25,000 to $30,000 on target. Vehicle, fully loaded: $15,000 per annum. Travel and accommodation across an island-and-a-half-shaped market, by road and air, is another $20,000. Samples at landed value plus trade show consumption: $10,000. Phone, laptop, CRM: $3,000. Training and industry credentials: $4,000. The rep doesn’t operate in a vacuum, so sales management, admin and reporting infrastructure load around 15% on top, adding another $25,000.

Call it $200,000 to keep the maths clean. That is what one sales seat costs you to do the job well, covering enough accounts often enough, with enough follow-through to actually drive depletions. Anything cheaper than that isn’t a discount. It’s a smaller job, fewer accounts, less coverage, weaker rotation. The number reflects the work, not an arbitrary rep cost. You get what you pay for. And think about that, if you are also the person doing the sales work for your own business.

That seat needs to return roughly twice its cost in gross profit annually to justify itself. Below that, it’s a loss. Above, it becomes a profit centre. The sell-through volume required depends on your price point, channel mix and margin structure, but it runs to multiples of revenue per rep, per year, generated from a single brand. Very few New Zealand distilleries are doing that volume from one product line.

That’s just sales. A credible annual marketing programme covering digital, PR, events, trade activation and creative runs $80,000 to $180,000. Fulfillment, 3PL and national freight add another $50,000 to $100,000 depending on how you fulfil those sales orders. Finance, admin and the systems that let you actually see what’s happening in market run $15,000 to $30,000 more. Before you pay yourself.

Doing it yourself doesn’t save the margin. If you’re doing it properly, which is synonymous with sustainably, your ‘margin’ is invested in a cost base roughly double what a distributor might charge, with none of the scale to absorb it.

This is where you have to really know the maths in your business. You need to know exactly how many cases you need to shift each month, each quarter, each year, to hit your business targets, and what it will cost to do it. The most important fine-tuning you’ll do as a producer isn’t on the stills, or even the marketing. It’s on the sales engine itself.

If you’re doing all that sales and distribution work yourself, you also need to be honest about where else it’s costing you. Every hour spent on the road is an hour you’re not spending on production planning, on cash flow, on the next product, on the people you employ. Time is often the most undercosted line item in small businesses, and it’s the one that runs (burns) out first.

Sure, the calculation shifts at different volumes. For the sub-1,000-case producer, self-distribution is often the only economically viable option, because the distributor model doesn’t start working until a brand has enough volume to share a rep seat meaningfully. So you tailor your geographic footprint, you focus on specific channels and removing friction. Bidfood is on your speeddial. Smart. For the 10,000-case-plus producer with established rotation, the conversation is about which distributor, not whether.

This piece is about the dangerous middle: producers with enough volume to be thinking about scale, too small to build a proper sales engine alone, and maybe for those too convinced of their independence to hand the work over.

WHO EATS WHAT

Where does the margin really go? You might see a gap between your wholesale price what lands on the retail shelf or the off-menu pour. The gap is built in stages, and none of those stages disappear when you skip the distributor.

Follow a craft spirit through the system. Production cost lands ex-distillery. Excise gets added, which is significant in New Zealand and paid by the producer whether or not a distributor is involved. Freight to a warehouse follows. From there, the distributor sells to the retailer at a margin that funds the sales function, logistics, trade spend and admin we’ve already costed. The retailer marks up again to shelf, taking the largest single slice in the chain. On a cocktail list, the same bottle is priced to deliver several times over pour cost. Same liquid, three different businesses, three margins stacked, and none of them existed because of the distributor.

Strip the distributor out and the retail margin doesn’t move. The on-trade markup doesn’t move. Trade activation, meaning POS, sampling, menu listings and staff education, is cost-shared when you have a distributor (the A & P line) and 100% yours when you don’t. Warehouse, freight, order desk, credit exposure, reporting all land on your balance sheet the moment you bring it in-house. And just because you’re not breaking it down on your own P&L, doesn’t mean it’s not the true cost of your sales engine.

The producer who resents the distributor’s cut is almost always looking at retail margin and trade costs that existed before the distributor was involved, and would exist without one. The frustration is real. It just isn’t aimed at the right number.

SELL-IN IS THE STARTING LINE. DEPLETIONS WIN THE REVENUE RACE.

This tiny principle separates producers who build durable spirits businesses from those who don’t. And it should be the crux of sales conversations internally as well as with a distributor.

Getting a case into a warehouse, whether via distributor or direct to retailer, is not a sale. It’s an accounting event. Getting bottles off shelves, into glasses, and into repeat orders is the actual business. The gap between those two is where most craft spirits brands go nowhere, and you don’t even see it happening. But it looks like dusty shoulders on a bottle sitting in retail. Shrinking re-orders. Buy-back requests.

The work that closes that gap is what a distributor’s margin pays for. Reorder cadence, velocity by SKU and channel, staff training for the people making recommendations at point of sale, menu placements, back-bar rotation, chasing the out-of-stocks no one sees because they’re not in the store at 4pm on a Thursday. None of it is glamorous, but all of it is the business.

A distributor rep has thirty seconds to pitch your brand to a buyer. If your story can’t survive that compression, with a hook, a point of difference, and a commercial reason to stock it, the cases won’t move. The brands that get pushed are the ones where reps walk in carrying a story that sells itself.

This work also underwrites valuation. When you raise capital or exit, nobody is buying your sell-in. They’re buying your depletion curve, the evidence that product keeps moving once it lands. Depletions are the revenue line that compounds, and without a depletion engine you don’t have a valuation story to tell.

SPECIALISATION: THE WORK YOU CAN’T REPLICATE

Relationships are the most valuable asset in a spirits business and you either trade on the quality of yours or the quality of your distributors. I ask clients where they want to be, behind the bar or the preferred at home choice, then send them to talk to various teams based on that trajectory. On-premise and off-premise are different sports, played by different people on different timelines. Getting a bottle onto a liquor store shelf is a different sale to getting it onto a cocktail list or a by-the-glass programme. The relationships, cadence and education required to win in each channel have almost nothing in common.

Specialist distributors exist because the work genuinely requires dedicated, full-time expertise. For a producer going direct, the question is uncomfortable. Who in your business is doing this work, at that level of specialisation, in the channels that matter most to your brand? If the answer is “I do it, between batches,” the answer is nobody. Part-time sales effort into specialist channels doesn’t produce part-time results. It usually produces nothing at all.

THE QUESTIONS BEFORE YOU GO IT ALONE

The question isn’t “how much margin can I save?”

Try asking: ”What does my business look like if I can move X volume of units a year? Do I have the sell-through volume to absorb a fully-loaded rep at $200,000-plus, returning twice their cost in gross profit? If not, who is driving depletions in every store and venue stocking my product, not in theory but this week? Am I running a credible trade activation programme, or relying on the liquid to sell itself? Can I actually see my depletions by SKU, by channel, by quarter, or am I reading sell-in figures and calling them sales? How much liquid is getting to lips each month? What’s the cost of it and what happens if I invest more?

A weak sales engine doesn’t get stronger by being owned outright, and an underfunded one doesn’t become adequate just because it’s yours.

YOU NEED A SALES ENGINE

You need a sales engine strategy. Not a distribution opinion, not a margin preference, but an actual strategy.

A distributor is one kind of sales engine. The shared, proven kind. It works because the cost of sales infrastructure is spread across a portfolio, and because the people doing the work do it full-time.

There’s a caveat that complicates every distribution conversation. A distributor amplifies brand effort, it doesn’t replace it. The top-performing craft brands in early markets are brand-led, even with excellent distribution. That means market visits every 60 to 90 days to the cities where the volume is, key account meetings personally attended, distributor reps trained by the brand so they carry the story accurately, and tastings, trade events and bartender nights hosted in person. The distributor’s implicit question is brutal and fair. If the brand isn’t pushing, why should we? Your energy drives early velocity, and without it you are one SKU on a long list, where lists get shorter every quarter. That’s why any distributor agreement needs to include marketing or A&P investment from the brand. That’s a sales engine.

The producers I recommend alternative models to understand this about themselves. They are small-volume, geographically concentrated, and channel-focused, or they have a structural asset most producers don’t. A cellar door with destination-level footfall. A single chain account that underwrites volume. A DTC business large enough to justify its own sales and marketing function. An on-premise programme anchored in relentless founder-led trade presence. Each of these can work, but each is a genuine engine, with a plan, a budget, and measurable rotation.

What doesn’t work is a smattering of tactics in the absence of a strategy. A cellar door plus a website plus a handful of stockists is not a sales engine. Many of New Zealand’s most admired small distilleries have been running on exactly this model for years, and the common feature is flat or declining revenue, invisible depletions, and teams who look increasingly tired.

If you can’t describe your sales engine in a paragraph, naming the channels, the rotation mechanism, the activation plan, and the person accountable for each, you don’t have one. What you have is inventory and hope. You’re just as likely to add complexity to a business instead of high quality sales fuel.

This is where external commercial strategy earns its keep, particularly for producers in the dangerous middle. The work doesn’t start with whether to use a distributor. It starts with what your sales engine needs to do, what it’s actually doing right now, and where the gap between the two is. That’s the diagnostic most producers aren’t set up to run on themselves, and it’s the work that needs doing before the route-to-market question can be answered honestly.

A distributor is infrastructure. The alternative is a different kind of infrastructure, and it has to be just as rigorous. Whichever way you go, you have to pick one, build it, and measure what it actually moves.

I like winemakers, and I especially like finding out what the drink when the harvest is done and the ferment is slowly at work. It’s even better when they like drinking bourbon and talking about the creative concept of making something new from great components. They are usually thoughtful, well-informed and almost always unique in character, just like what they make. And they always have personality.

“I’m probably going to piss off both the Americans and the French in saying this,” Daniel Brennan tells me, with a particular sparkle in his eye that suggests he doesn’t mind a little cheek here and there.

He’s talking about French oak. Specifically, French oak tannins in bourbon—angular, direct, spicy—meeting American whiskey’s fat vanilla roundness inside the decanter-like bottle of Nowhere bourbon. The globe explodes within this glass, along with some traditional ideas about how spirits are shaped and shape the world of flavour we experience. Nowhere Bourbon is new and distinctive, first arriving on my desk in late 2025, sparking plenty of curiosity until I finally sat down with the team.

Nowhere is bourbon, and a little bit more. An elevated expression of what bourbon has traditionally been and what happens when a winemaker gets hold of it with disciplined restraint and some very specific ideas about oak.

The bourbon inside Nowhere was made in southern Indiana by a distiller named Wilbert Best, who also makes wine. He’s a little mad scientist, a little distilling genius. It crossed the Pacific, arrived in Hawke’s Bay, and finished its journey in French oak that previously held Brennan’s Decibel Pinot Noir.

I promise you, this story is more than just another craft product on the market. It’s about a philosophy on making good spirits, seizing opportunity and exploring the bourbon landscape against the backdrop of New World Whisky* and wine. A frontier of expression and exploration with plenty of personality.

Not Everything From New Zealand Should Be Mashed Together

Sometimes good ideas start with not so great ones.

The Nowhere story begins with manuka honey and family. Enter Zach Gustafson’s father-in-law, who approached Daniel Brennan with surplus honey and supply chain issues left over from COVID. “What about making a honey whiskey?”

Daniel wasn’t initially enticed, but he’s pragmatic. “I know he’s a smart guy and he does his research. So I said, go ahead and have a look at where the honey whiskies are on the shelf.”

A month later: “Man, they’re all pretty bad, and they’re pretty cheap, and they’re not doing too well out there in the market.”

“Yeah,” Daniel said. “But we should look into bourbon.”

New Zealand has a bourbon problem. “I just kept cringing at the fact that people think bourbon in New Zealand is just about the bourbon and coke RTD cans,” he says.

“Bourbon is completely underserved in New Zealand,” Daniel says. He grew up in a bar in Philadelphia. Bourbon was a big part of the portfolio there. Every time he visited home, there were new and interesting bourbons behind the bar. The contrast with what he could access in New Zealand was stark. New Zealand is the highest per capita consumer of Jim Beam globally. We’re not talking about bourbon appreciation. We’re talking about a category dominated by RTD consumption, where bourbon exists as a delivery mechanism for fizzy sweetness rather than as a spirit worth contemplating.

Back in the US, American craft spirits have exploded over the last 15 years with explorations into grains, cask play and maturation styles flooding the market with good quality and interesting styles of spirit. Daniel had been watching bourbon explode in North America while travelling for Decibel wines—his biggest market is the US, while facing ongoing frustration at limited shelf selection here in New Zealand.

Bourbon’s footprint in Australia and New Zealand is growing steadily, but New Zealand presents a challenge: demand for bourbon and rye is increasing again as classic whisky cocktails find prevalence at the bar but more premium bottles are only available in small numbers moving ever so slowly off the shelf. There’s a taste for bourbon, but not enough variance or drive to move the category forward.

So maybe not honey whisky, but bourbon, he thought. That’s worth a crack.

And where does Zach fit in? Well, he and his young family had also made the move from the US to Hawkes Bay, so an introduction between the two was only a matter of time. Some might say perfectly timed to help bring the Nowhere bourbon project together.

They started by bringing in other brands first via South Street Imports, learning New Zealand market dynamics in liquor before launching their own. For bourbon fans like myself, the arrival of Copper Still and Doc Whiskey, was quiet but rewarding. Last year, they picked up a swag of local spirits awards medals to add to the international gongs too.

“It was a good way to cut our teeth.”

Finding Wilbert Best

Meanwhile, the project to launch a premium bourbon that really suited and grabbed the attention of the New Zealand market was all go. At first when I read “Southern Indiana” on the label, I assumed the bourbon was coming from MGP—that Indiana giant producing bourbon for half the “craft” brands in America. So I asked the question and got a firm no. After all, why would a winemaker devoted to single vineyard expressions all of a sudden go bulk spirit?

“I’d realised so many of these ‘craft’ bourbons were all made at the same place in Kentucky or Indiana,” Daniel explains. “They might have two barrels of their stuff sitting up there. Not to take away from the quality, but to me, finding someone personal to work with was part of the adventure.”

Which is where we meet Wilbert Best. “I thought, oh, this is the perfect name for a whiskey maker. And the bourbon was good too.”

Best Vineyards Winery and Distillery in Elizabeth, Indiana is remarkably close to the Kentucky border with a vineyard established in 2000 and a distillery operating since 2016. “I’ll just say New Zealand’s definitely ahead of the winemaking from Indiana”.

But they were there for bourbon, not wine. In that, the location mattered: southern Indiana, close to the border and across the river from Louisville, KY offers the same great access to good soils, good grain and great water as some of bourbon’s greatest producers. It just looks and feels a little like the middle of nowhere, according to Daniel. Or maybe even further, according to me.

“It felt right. But I was wondering where the hell am I? Probably the opposite end of nowhere. But Wilbert was was really cool and very authentic and even a little questionable but in a good way”, Daniel says with a grin. You start to get a sense of the personalities ringing Nowhere Bourbon to life.

The plan was relatively simple, to begin with. (We’ll get to execution).

Source gorgeous spirit, bring it to New Zealand and finish it in Daniel’s Decibel wine casks. A marriage of skillsets, spirit and cask. A unification of two great products, each characterful with place and provenance. Get it to market. Solve the NZ bourbon problem.

Salt and Pepper, Not a Whole Meal

Of course, nothing is quite that straightforward. Craft takes knowledge, skill and time. Daniel Brennan is a winemaker. This matters more than it might seem.

Building a sustainable and internationally recognised career in winemaking is no small feat for a boy from Philly. Born into a Sicilian-Irish Philadelphia family steeped in hospitality, his winemaking style has evolved to bring New World willingness to try and Old World skill and sensibility together. He says his wines aren’t about mass-market appeal, instead they’re meant to be expressive, distinct, and interesting. He works with a range of small-scale grape growers, using a variety of fermentation techniques to explore what stories the wine can tell of place.

Unsurprisingly, this same approach comes across to the finishing of Nowhere Bourbon.

When he started thinking about finishing bourbon in wine barrels, he had advantages most bourbon-makers don’t: his own actual wine barrels. But more importantly, he had a winemaker’s discipline about intervention. About knowing when enough is enough.

“I’d rather be understated and safe and just let the process and product speak for itself.” This is not common thinking in a spirits landscape where barrel finishes can be heavy-handed, where more is often confused with better.

He chose Pinot Noir barrels specifically—from 2020 and 2021 vintages—steamed clean. Not Malbec, not Syrah, nothing with heavy tannins that would overpower. The winemaker’s knowledge shows in the details: “Spirits will penetrate the oak a lot more. They’re going deeper into the pores and into the staves. It’s going to pull out some extra tannins from the oak itself.”

French oak, specifically. Which is where the pissing-off-two-nations comment comes in. “American oak tannins are more like fat and vanillas and coconuts. French oak—which is why it suits New Zealand wine so much—they’re more direct tannins. You could literally look at them under a microscope and they’re like a little bit more angular. So they add like a little more spice.”

The result: softness up front from the Pinot influence, then that angular spice finish from the French oak, layered over the bourbon’s inherent richness and the 21% rye in the mash bill.

“So dare I say some American bourbon is clashing with some French oak and I can piss off two nations at the same time. But I think everybody here in New Zealand will be real happy with it.”

The finishing time was carefully monitored. Weekly tastings. “This is just going to be like a finishing touch, maybe just a little salt and pepper on it. The bourbon itself, we knew it’s a beautiful product already. We didn’t really want to muck it up too much.”

Threading the Needle

Zach is direct about their positioning: “We know bourbon is not a big market. Doing a wine barrel finish in bourbon is something that’s not super popular, so all of it’s like a bit of an entry point.”

Everything about Nowhere is calibrated to be approachable without being simplistic. The rye influence is just enough to balance and add depth but nothing with too much attitude. “It’s got a little bit of spice but not something that’s gonna burn their face off.” The wine finish? Present but not overpowering. “If someone is kind of just getting into these finishes, it’s good for that.”

They use the term “threading the needle” repeatedly—appealing to whiskey nerds while staying accessible to bourbon newcomers, creating something distinctive without being alienating, premium but not absurdly priced. Finding the narrow space between two rigid ideas.

“It’s got like a little Kiwi twist without being inauthentic with what it is,” Zach says. They’re not calling it Hawke’s Bay whiskey. It’s bourbon, made in America, finished thoughtfully in New Zealand.

The real consumer test came at Barrels by the Bay in Tauranga last year. Daniel gets animated describing it: “People who liked Scotch and knew Irish whiskeys but really hadn’t had a quality bourbon at all. They were tasting the bourbons and just being immediately blown away. Hey, bourbon can be this good, you know. You just haven’t experienced it.”

“They were like, what the hell?” The realization that bourbon could have this kind of complexity challenged assumptions for many. For Scotch drinkers, wine cask finishes are increasingly common and growing in popularity. And a lot of New Zealand whisky makers use Pinot Noir barrels too. But bourbon and wine? “We can convert a lot of these people that love Scotch to just try this sometimes, based on that bridge.”

When I ask what Nowhere compares to, Daniel deliberately steps away from bourbon comparisons. “I’d almost want to step away from bourbon and maybe take some other spirits, like Irish whiskey or Scotch.” He references lowland Scotches—richer, less peaty—and premium Irish whiskeys with alternative cask finishes. The Green Spot finished in Château Montelena barrels is a touchstone. “That’s sort of a benchmark that we were trying to reach, and we’re getting there.”

What Comes Next

Nowhere’s journey to market took too long, both Zach and Daniel admit. Ocean crossings, customs delays, development time. “Definitely not an advantage for our bottom line,” Daniel admits.

But there’s a silver lining. “At the very least, the stuff isn’t getting any worse.” The bourbon still in barrel in Hawke’s Bay, aging through warm summers and cool winters? It’s developing character. Each batch will be unique.

Daniel’s already playing with the next evolution. “We’ve taken one old bourbon barrel and I put some Malbec in it. We’re going the opposite way now too.” They’re also collaborating with a local brewery, passing bourbon barrels over for a bourbon barrel stout. “Trying to put bourbon in different places that you might not see it in New Zealand,” Zach says.

This is the craft ecosystem story New Zealand hasn’t fully realized yet—the cross-pollination between distilleries, breweries, and wineries that’s been happening in the American Pacific Northwest for years. Barrels moving between producers, experiments building on experiments.

They’re pragmatic about timing. “Maybe not the world’s greatest time to launch a spirits company,” Zach acknowledges. “There’s a lot of industry headwinds right now.”

Still, there’s opportunity in the underserved market. “If we were trying to sell them a new gin, I don’t think they’d give us the time of day. But bourbon is just somewhat of an underserved market where there’s a little more of a conversation to be had.”

“We’re really trying to focus on New Zealand and not trying to mimic the US,” Zach says. But they watch what Mitcher’s is doing—”pushing the premium bourbon desire, which helps all of us build out that market.”

Recently joining the portfolio of Wag & Co, they’re set for growth in bars and retail this year.

The Philosophy of Nowhere

I’d usually want to challenge the brand promise associated with the word ‘Nowhere’, but there’s something satisfying about bourbon made in Indiana (not Kentucky), finished in New Zealand (not America), with French oak (not American), by a American winemaker (not a distiller), that pushes the existing boundaries of how we understand New World categories.

Nowhere as concept. Nowhere as the productive, creative space between certainties.

“We’re borrowing the best from all cultures and ending up with something that elevates the experience as a whole,” I tell them during our conversation.

Daniel immediately responds: “We’re gonna steal that.”

They’re welcome to it. Because that’s exactly what they’re doing—not pretending to make New Zealand whiskey, not over-claiming the wine connection, not cosplaying American craft distilling. Just making something good with intelligence and restraint, letting the process speak for itself in the end result.

The bourbon inside Nowhere is beautiful already, Daniel keeps saying. They didn’t want to muck it up or over-complicate it. Just adding that salt and pepper. That little extra dimension of finesse and seasoning that elevates it to something unique.

“We’re seeing a lot of that with my wine peeps and friends who taste it,” Daniel confirms. “They like good spirits, maybe they don’t know that much about bourbon. Right away they’re like, oh yeah, give me a bottle. I got a gift lined up for myself.”

I tasted the Nowhere Bourbon for myself before I interviewed Daniel and Zach:

TASTING NOTE:
Full noise sweetness, vanilla and chewy toffee on the nose with a hint of milk chocolate. Big sweetness up front with complexity that suggests nuttiness and spice. Very smooth on the palate, mouthfilling with cinnamon and nutmeg. Traditional caramel notes of traditional American corn, creamy with a touch of minty herb from rye. The shape of the whisky is like a teardrop, sharp and sweet at the beginning and then a juicy drop that sinks into the palate. Roasted peanuts and fruit character soften the edges holding bold flavours in tension with complexity.

Nowhere Bourbon is available at select retailers and on-premise accounts.
www.nowherebourbon.com

*Whisky and whiskey are used interchangeably in this story to best reflect the provenance and style of spirit being discussed at the time.

Valuable lessons for anyone looking at (or cooking) the books.

I was visiting Nearest Green Distillery, the Tennessee home of Uncle Nearest’s Premium Whiskey in May 2024, fourteen months before the big legal envelopes started arriving at their door. Big, beautiful copper stills glinted through the stillhouse windows under the blazing sun. No visit inside though, according to the guide. No point, they were still not wired in after being installed years prior. Not unplugged, not being serviced. Never once fired up, not even as an expensive tourist attraction at the place they call Malt Disney World. If you know the price of copper these days, you’ll understand how extraordinary a concept it is to spend that much money and then never bother turning them on. After all, if you’re in the whisky business, making whisky is usually pretty key to making money.

The brand-tastic whisky I’d been following since 2018 wasn’t being made there either, as it turned out. Uncle Nearest Premium Whiskey was actually distilling (by their team, I was assured) down the road at a contracted facility while the brand equity compounded at an extraordinary rate. Beautiful facilities. Great story. Growing faster than almost any whisky brand in American history. And those stills, sitting cold and quiet in the Tennessee heat.

The more questions I asked, the more my guide’s frustration showed.

It was about then I knew something was very, very wrong in Shelbyville, TN.

The Uncle Nearest Problem

If you haven’t been following the legal drama unfolding around Uncle Nearest, here’s what you need to know. Founded in 2017 by Fawn and Keith Weaver to honour Nathan “Nearest” Green — the man historically credited with teaching Jack Daniel his craft, and America’s first known Black master distiller — it became the fastest-growing American whiskey brand in history. By 2024, it was supposedly stocked in more than 30,000 venues across 12 countries. Fawn Weaver claimed a valuation of $1 billion and had raised capital from over 160 individual investors at an average of around $500,000 each. It was the kind of brand story that makes the industry feel buoyant.

Then the numbers arrived.

In July 2025, primary lender Farm Credit Mid-America filed suit in a federal Tennessee court, alleging Uncle Nearest had defaulted on more than $108 million in loans. Among the sharpest accusations: the company had overstated its barrel inventory by $21 million, inflating its borrowing base to access larger credit draws. When third-party inspectors conducted a physical collateral check, significant discrepancies emerged between the barrels that existed on paper and those that existed in the warehouse. The lawsuit also alleges that the borrowers bought an estate on Martha's Vineyard for $2 million and sold futures on their business at a discounted cost.

It is undisputed that a then-officer of the company misrepresented Uncle Nearest’s barrel inventory to obtain an additional $24 million under the revolving loan. The Weavers maintain they were unaware, placing responsibility on former CFO Michael Senzaki, who was fired in 2024. Senzaki denies wrongdoing. A federal judge ordered the company into receivership in August 2025. The court-appointed receiver found that company records before 2024 had been deleted, that Uncle Nearest owed an additional $50 million to vendors and creditors beyond the original loan, and that federal tax returns had not been filed since 2018.

The question of fraud versus catastrophic mismanagement is ultimately for the courts to resolve. But the structural problem at the heart of the case — barrels used as collateral at valuations that didn’t survive scrutiny — isn’t unique to Uncle Nearest. It’s a feature of the craft spirits investment model globally.

Promises, Knocks on Wood and Big Dreams

Anyone willing to spend an afternoon on PledgeMe or Snowball Effect can read what New Zealand distilleries have told retail investors about what their barrels are worth, what they’ll sell for, and approximately when. That’s the value of a public document, much the same as the Companies Register, the Security Register and the Insolvency Register.

So let’s take a look at two campaigns, as illustrations of an industry-wide challenge: in a market still writing its own rules. With no established secondary market for NZ aged whisky casks and no historical price benchmarks at auction, optimistic projection isn’t a character flaw. It’s almost structurally required to make a compelling case for investment. The tension is that the market you’re projecting into eight years from now may not resemble the one you’re standing in today, as recently proven by a global spirits over-supply. Which shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone investing in agricultural commodities.

In late 2018, The NZ Whisky Collection raised $780,030 via PledgeMe to fit out a distillery in Oamaru and expand cask production. The offer was pitched against a booming global appetite for new world whisky — Japanese, Taiwanese, Australian, now New Zealand. The language was confident about trajectory: traditional brands declining, craft experiences ascendant. All reasonable to say in 2018.

What’s harder to evaluate now is where those projections sit against a retail whisky market that has since become significantly more crowded and price-sensitive. They got the stills and eventually installed them in Dunedin.

More recently, Reefton Distilling Co. raised $1.7 million via Snowball Effect in 2024 to scale whisky inventory and warehousing. Reefton is a serious operation with genuine credentials—Little Biddy Gin has driven successful revenue. Their raise positioned maturing cask inventory as a core asset in the company’s value story. Which it is.

Cardrona Distillery took on private equity to cashflow operations before selling to International Beverage, Scapegrace have a group of investors. Investment tends to be an easier answer than traditional bank business lending in NZ, due to the nature and risk associated with the industry.

The question that applies to every whisky business raising on the promise of aged inventory is the same one: is the projected value of that inventory grounded in market reality, and could a lender verify it if they needed to? Inventory is only an asset if you can actually sell it when required. Otherwise we might call them liabilities.

The type of projections you produce tells you a lot about the strength and validity of the business model.

Across the Tasman, It Already Got Serious and Scandalous

Between cautiously optimistic market projections and genuine ambition, every aged spirit valuation assumes someone will inevitably pay more for what time and wood have produced. But what happens when the barrels are filled with nothing but air?

New Zealand has no documented cases of barrel investment fraud, and nothing in the crowdfunding campaigns examined here suggests anything other than genuine attempts to build whisky businesses. But across the Tasman, the worst-case version of this story is still playing out in a Hobart courtroom.

Keith Batt, founder of Nant Distilling, appeared before the Hobart Magistrates’ Court in January 2025, charged with 736 alleged offences — including 622 counts of fraud — relating to a barrel investment scheme that allegedly ran from 2007 to 2016. The scheme offered investors two barrels of Tasmanian single malt for AU$25,000, with a guaranteed 9.55% return at maturation. One investor paid approximately $170,000 for 14 barrels. He was later told his barrels did not exist.

When Australian Whisky Holdings undertook a forensic audit prior to purchasing the distillery, they found over 1,300 barrels that simply didn’t exist — 720 missing, others never filled, others already decanted and sold without investors’ knowledge. Some barrels had been filled well below the industry standard ABV, meaning the spirit would eventually fall below the legal threshold to be classified as whisky at all. The owner names and barrel numbers had been sanded off others.

This is the extreme end. But industry observers watching the broader Australian craft whisky market have noted structural vulnerabilities that predate Nant and don’t require bad intent to cause harm. Several small distilleries have closed, stopped production, or quietly dumped maturing stock to claw back funds — because the business model couldn’t sustain the long wait for aged inventory to generate revenue. The gap between when you fill a barrel and when you can sell what’s in it is the central financial challenge of every whisky business. Creative accounting, or optimistic projection, can paper over it for only so long. And given the whisky industry is largely ungoverned here in Australasia, the question of who is paying attention to whether the casks on the balance sheet match the casks in the barrel hall is one worth sitting with.

Scandal gets headlines. Bad business practice is often ignored.

Every Dollar in a Barrel Is a Bet

There is financial reality that whisky-making romance tends to obscure: capital expenditure can’t be wishful thinking. Every dollar you spend building a distillery, purchasing casks, filling barrels, and paying rent on bonded storage has to generate a return. Especially when it’s not your money to begin with. The clock starts running the moment new make spirit goes into wood — not when it comes out. Your exposure as a business is how long you can hold stock or cover the cost of time, which is why so many distilleries are now throttling production back.

That makes aged whisky inventory a uniquely punishing asset class. It’s not just illiquid; it’s actively expensive to hold. You’re paying the cost of capital — the interest on a loan, or the opportunity cost of equity tied up — on an asset that won’t generate revenue for years. Whether you’re running your business on debt or on equity raised with optimistic projections, you’re still running it on a future position. Long-horizon inventory doesn’t compress to fit a short-horizon cashflow problem.

The wine industry is providing an object lesson in what happens when the market moves against you before the asset matures. In California, the scale of recent closures is staggering: Vintage Wine Estates — which owned more than 60 brands and went public at a $600 million valuation in 2021 — filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2024, weighed down by $310 million in debt after overextending through acquisitions. Gallo, the world’s largest wine producer by volume, closed multiple facilities across Napa and Sonoma through 2024 and into 2025, shedding capacity it built for a market that no longer exists at that scale. The 2024 California wine grape crush hit a 20-year low. Growers are replacing vines with alternative cash crops.

Australia is no different. Treasury Wine Estates closed its Karadoc winery in Victoria, describing it as a “last resort.” Accolade Wines — Hardy’s, Croser, Banrock Station — ended up in the hands of distressed asset specialists after private equity reached end of tolerance. In the Riverland and Barossa, some growers are walking away from vineyards without seeking a buyer, because the cost of administration and asset disposal exceeds what a distressed sale would recover. This is the end stage of a business model that borrowed against future market conditions.

Whisky isn’t wine, and the production cycle differences matter. Similarly with craft beer that is also wrestling with new ways of funding business as usual, not even growth. But the underlying equation is identical: if the gap between what you spend now and what you receive later is funded by debt or investor optimism rather than genuine market data, you are exposed.

What the Lender Sees

Aged spirits inventory valued on a projected future sale price is fundamentally different from inventory valued at cost. The gap between those two numbers is where risk lives — specifically, the unknown cost of converting cost-basis inventory into that projected value, in a market nobody can fully predict.

In New Zealand, where there’s no established secondary market for domestic whisky casks and no historical price data for what a mature NZ single malt actually fetches, those projections are aspirational almost by necessity. For a business with genuine quality and patient investors, that’s a manageable position. For one facing a cash crunch before the barrels are ready, the gap closes very fast.

Any NZ distillery that has raised public capital on the promise of maturing stock owes its investors clear answers to a few basic questions: What’s the cost-basis valuation of current inventory? What are the projected depletion timelines, and are they on track? What’s the plan if the aged whisky takes longer, or fetches less, than originally modelled?

The Books Don’t Lie. Sometimes Owners Do.

The Uncle Nearest evidence keeps circling closer and closer to this inevitable truth bomb: business failure at this scale doesn’t arrive suddenly. It’s constructed, slowly, through a series of decisions that each felt defensible at the time. Another draw on the loan. Creating new entities to borrow and spread risk, moving money and assets to cashflow payroll. Another quarter where the depletion numbers weren’t quite what the model predicted, but the brand was growing so the trajectory was fine.

Founders in the craft spirits sector are almost always product people first. That’s not a criticism but it also means that the gap between what a founder understands about maturation, flavour development, and cask selection, and what they understand about their own balance sheet, can be large. The best ones identify the gaps, learn fast and surround themselves with experience and experts. The job of the Boss, whether CEO or Founder, is to know, to steer and to deliver good business, regardless of what the business is.

Fawn Weaver has maintained throughout the Uncle Nearest proceedings that she was unaware of the inflated barrel inventory figures. That may be entirely true. But “I didn’t know” is a statement about information flow, not a defence of governance. When you sign the loan documents, when your name is on the entity, when investors have written cheques on the basis of projections you presented — the books are your responsibility. Not your CFO’s. Not your accountant’s. Yours. Delegating crunching numbers is reasonable. Abdicating responsibility for them is not.

This matters for New Zealand’s craft distillery sector because the conditions that enabled the Uncle Nearest situation — operating debt as a growth strategy, barrel valuations that outpace reality, retail investors whose enthusiasm exceeds their financial analysis, lack of validated business model and governance — are not unique to Tennessee. The question isn’t whether NZ distillers are honest. The question is whether our businesses are literate: in best business practice, business finance and projections and building a profitable model.

Liquidation and going out of business are not things that happen to you. They are, with rare exceptions, the compounded result of decisions: to grow faster than cashflow supports, to value assets at what you need them to be worth rather than what they are, over-estimation of market opportunity, cost of customer acquisition and market repositioning. Every one of those decisions is a choice. They rarely feel like choices at the time. They feel like strategy, or necessity, or just keeping the lights on one more quarter. But they accumulate, and the bill arrives, and by then the options have narrowed considerably.

Even if a miracle investor came along to soak up Uncle Nearest’s $108m Farm Credit loan, the receiver estimates you’d need a purchase price of $250m just to tidy up the remaining debt ledger before you could turn the lights back on, not accounting for what it costs to turn the lights on at a $50m distillery. (Ask the Scapegrace boys at Lake Dunstan).

The distilleries that survive are the ones run by leaders who are willing to be honest with themselves about the numbers and learn what it takes to run a business by the books, instead of trying to magic up results that fit a farcical projection. It can be learned. It has to be.

Perhaps best summed up as yes, you have to spend money to make money. But you better show us exactly how the money you spend will generate the revenue at a price worth the cost.

Managing the Forecast When You Can’t Control the Market

The distilleries most likely to navigate this environment successfully share one characteristic: they treat their financial projections as living documents rather than sales documents. And they don’t take on debt that can’t be financed out of real cashflow. These are not sophisticated disciplines. They are the minimum viable requirement for running a business that holds long-horizon assets in a variable market. The fact that so many operators in this sector treat them as optional extras is precisely why the sector produces so many cautionary tales.

The first question I always ask a spirits brand is not about sales figures. It’s about depletions. Sales figures tell you what left your warehouse. Depletions tell you what actually sold off the shelf. The gap between those two numbers is inventory sitting in a distributor’s warehouse or retailer’s shelf, which is not the same thing as measurable consumer demand. Brands that track and communicate depletion metrics honestly have a real-time read on actual product movement. Brands that report only sales figures, or conflate the two, are either deceiving their investors or deceiving themselves. Sell-through is the realest validator of whether a market exists for your product at your price point, and it’s the metric every investor in a craft spirits business should be asking for first.

The second discipline is scenario planning against that data — not one optimistic trajectory, but a range. What does the business look like if sell-through tracks 20% below projection for the first two years of release? What if the premium whisky category softens by the time your aged stock is ready? What levers exist to generate cashflow in the meantime — contract distilling for other producers, early release of younger expressions, cellar door revenue? The distilleries with answers to these questions before they’re needed are the ones that survive the market moving sideways. Every business model needs a net-zero option: a clear, honest picture of exactly how to keep the lights on without profit, and for how long.

The third discipline follows: value inventory conservatively, and generate revenue aggressively. Cost-basis valuation — what it actually cost to produce and store the spirit — is defensible to a lender, an auditor, and an investor. Projected future market value is a forecast, and it should be labelled as one. The gap between those two numbers is your exposure. Your best business solutions start with what the numbers actually tell you, and what you can do with the resources you have.

Most of what Uncle Nearest is experiencing is a case of bad business leadership, not bad whisky or a bad market. Those circumstances only compound the problem. Brand equity and founder charisma carried it far further than the balance sheet could justify — which is exactly the warning, not the comfort.

The New Zealand spirits industry is genuinely exciting. It deserves business leaders who are as rigorous about their books as they are passionate about their product. Those two things are not in tension. One is what makes the other sustainable.

The barrel will cost you money every single day it sits in that warehouse, regardless of how good the story is. The question is whether you know exactly how much, exactly why, and exactly what you’re going to do about it. The Uncle Nearest story should be the wake-up call to every NZ spirits business owner to get their head in the books, get sharper than ever on realistic market predictions and sharpen the knives; ready to rid themselves of magical thinking and buckle up for the ride ahead.

The whisky loch is full to overflowing, as are the shelves. The question that used to be what price would you get is now whether bottles will get to shelf at all. Case in point, Uncle Nearest is now selling for as low as $19.99 in some markets, a far cry from it’s full price hey-day.

The Uncle Nearest case is still unfolding. As is Keith Batts’ case.

Capital promises solutions. The still that will finally let you scale production. The warehouse that will house ten years of maturing whisky. The marketing budget that will crack export markets. It promises to solve all the problems you’ve been white-knuckling your way through with cashflow and credit cards and sheer bloody-mindedness.

Sometimes it delivers. Sometimes it creates other problems, bigger than the ones it solved.

I’ve talked to lots of food & beverage founders about money. The ones who raised capital and learned hard lessons about governance. The ones who raised it brilliantly, some who crashed and burned, and the ones still untangling themselves from decisions made five years ago. Some who chose to go it alone. What’s that internet meme? Everything is hard, choose your hard.

Most know they want capital—who wouldn’t want a million dollars to make problems disappear?—but capital doesn’t make or break success. So I’m bringing you the stories behind some of the successful (and unsuccessful) raises of 2025.

Buckle Up, Buttercup - Before We Begin
Before you know whether you’re ready to sell, raise capital, or keep reinvesting profits, you need strategic clarity on what you’re actually building. Not what sounds good in a pitch deck. What you’re building, why you’re building it, and what success looks like when you get there.

Many raise capital without that clarity on why investment is the right path to the result. They’re raising because competitors did, because it feels like the next milestone, because the narrative of growth requires it. These are terrible reasons to take on investors.

So before you build that pitch deck or approach that platform or court those investors, answer this: Why are you actually seeking capital? Not “what would you do with it”—anyone can fill a spreadsheet with uses for money. But why? What breaks in your business without it? What accelerates with it? What changes fundamentally?

Why Distilleries Seek Investment (And When It Actually Makes Sense)

The spirits industry is brutally capital-intensive. Scaling production requires space, equipment, and working capital that most bootstrapped businesses can’t self-fund. Warehousing whisky that won’t generate revenue for a decade ties up hundreds of thousands in inventory.

But there’s a world of difference between raising capital to accelerate a working business model and raising capital to fix a broken one.

Legitimate reasons: You need infrastructure for scale after proving the model at small volume. You’re making whisky or aged spirits and need capital to build maturing inventory while cashflow comes from other products. You’ve proven product-market fit domestically and need capital to enter new markets with different distribution requirements.

Problematic reasons disguise themselves as legitimate ones. Raising capital to cover monthly operating losses means you have a business model problem, not a capital problem. Chasing revenue growth without margin improvement is expensive failure in slow motion. Raising capital to “fund expansion and growth” can also read as code for “figure out your business model”. Or asking investors to fund your education.

The fundamental test: if you can’t raise capital, does your business fail or just grow more slowly? If the answer is “fails,” you’re not ready to do anything but fix your business model.

The Market Reality: Buyers Are Divesting

Ten years ago, five years ago and as recently as last month, the conversation rolls like this: I’ll start, build, grow, invest, grow more, sell bigger, everybody makes a profit. But today that reads more like a South Park plan.

It was almost two decades ago that Geoff Ross sold 42 Below to Bacardi for US$91 million. The company had never turned a profit. Bacardi bought potential, story, swagger. Seventeen years later, 42 Below is all but a memory and Four Pillars Gin—three-time world’s best gin distillery with distribution in 25 countries and proven profitability—sold to Lion for AUD$50 million after a decade of relentless excellence. Swagger no longer sells. And it shouldn’t - whether to a big buyout or a small investor.

Another important story is happening in reverse. Campari Group announced in October 2024 that it would divest approximately 30 brands generating €220 million—roughly NZD $400 million—in annual revenue. Because they don’t deliver enough margin. Diageo launched its Diageo Luxury Group the same month, consolidating only brands retailing at $100 and above. They’ve been systematically divesting over the last 7 years—selling Seagram’s VO and other brands to Sazerac for $550 million in 2018. Yep, you read that right. Before the crunch came.

The big buyers aren’t buying how they used to. They’re pruning portfolios, cutting anything that doesn’t deliver premium pricing and exceptional margins at scale.

Even when acquisitions happen, it’s not a silver bullet. International Beverage acquired Cardrona Distillery in September 2023 with promises of global growth. The investors got liquidity, but changing market tides mean global expansion has been slow as International Beverage’s Scotch business wades through an industry-wide slowdown.

Even when you’ve got the plan, you can run out and keep asking for more. Scapegrace are currently (quietly) advertising for a investor visa opportunity. I asked them for comment on this story and their success, but they declined.

Most New Zealand distilleries chasing $5-30 million exits haven’t confronted the buyer’s market shift (weird, given how obsessed when it happens in property). Which means most distilleries need to build businesses that work without exits.

Pathway One: Equity Crowdfunding

Wills Cameron’s Remarkable Cream came to PledgeMe with 15,000 direct customers already generating real revenue. When their Keto range launched, they did $340,000 in sales in 30 days. The crowdfunding campaign came down to the final three hours before hitting its minimum target, but it worked because they weren’t asking strangers to believe in potential—they were inviting existing customers to own what they already loved.

Choosing the right platform mattered as much as having the right foundation. Wills initially approached both Snowball and PledgeMe.

“I did actually initially try and go to Snowball,” Will told me. “They were like, ‘Oh no, I don’t think you’re going to be able to get that valuation. And it’s really not a good time to raise, you should come back in a year and a half.’ And then I spoke to Anna from PledgeMe, and she’s just full of energy. She was like, ‘I reckon you can do it. This is a great story, and you’re in a great position and everything.’”

PledgeMe believed in what Remarkable Cream had already built. They weren’t asking Will to wait for better market conditions—they recognised the proof was already there for the platform, the product and the pitch.

The capital deployment strategy was precise and easy for investors to grasp: one-third to capex, two-thirds to growth and working capital. Not sexy equipment that photographs well for investor updates, but the unsexy essentials that keep a scaling business from choking on its own success.

“I’ve seen people in the beverage industry raise money, move into a big factory, and then all the staff are just sitting around,” Wills said. “They didn’t keep enough money aside for the growth.”

The crowdfunding model delivered something beyond money: 145+ shareholders who function as brand ambassadors, buying product, gifting it globally, making introductions. When you’re competing against established international brands, having hundreds of people championing your product creates competitive advantage.

Crowdfunding works when you have existing revenue (minimum $500k-$1M annually) and for Wills, that engaged audience of 10,000+ direct customers who actually buy, not just follow on Instagram. Your raise target needs to sit under $2M. You want brand ambassadors as much as capital. You’re comfortable with 400+ shareholders and the reporting requirements.

This won’t work when you’re pre-revenue, when you need more than $2M, when you want strategic investors bringing governance, when you can’t articulate exactly where every dollar goes, or when you’re not prepared for radical transparency. If platforms tell you to “come back later,” listen.

Watch for these red flags: your pitch centers on “if we just had capital, then we’d figure out the business model.” You don’t have product-market fit validated by actual sales. You’re hoping the campaign will “create buzz.” Your customer acquisition cost makes the economics unsustainable.

Pathway Two: Strategic Investors

Blair Nicholl at National Distillery Company went out for a capital raise and the market said no. Global economic slowdown, heavy US focus during uncertain times, and a valuation that didn’t match their investor type all contributed. They wanted strategic investors bringing governance and connections but the pricing model and service provider didn’t fit. The result was a crash and burn.

“We naively assumed that paying a large external firm meant they’d automatically ‘hook the fish,’” Blair admitted. “It was a huge learning curve.”

The pivot came quickly: a smaller internal raise among existing shareholders, forming a solid advisory group, role restructuring, and redirection to the domestic market. Most importantly, a shift from chasing top-line growth to focusing on gross profit. If you’re paying attention, you’ll begin to see a pattern.

“Growing without the right working capital turns into a race to the bottom where you compete on price instead of building a brand,” Blair said.

The failed raise forced the right question—do we need capital, or do we need a better business model?—and the answer turned out to be the latter. They started saying no, especially to new product releases. Strategic discipline looks like the painful “no, because...” of focus rather than the exciting “yes, and...” of expansion. You don’t get there by raising more money. You get there by not having the option.

Blair learned something crucial about investor selection: “We’re looking for the needle in the haystack—an investor who truly aligns with our vision, not just financially but strategically. It’s not just about capital anymore; it’s about governance, shared belief, and business synergy.”

This pathway works when you need significant capital ($2M+) that crowdfunding can’t deliver, when you want governance and strategic guidance alongside money, when you have a proven business model with clear path to profitability, and when your valuation matches the value-add you’re asking investors to provide.

It fails when your valuation is based on comparable tech startups rather than drinks businesses, when you’re chasing investors who won’t understand industry economics, when you’re seeking capital to “figure the next step out with their help” rather than scale what works, or when you want the money but not the governance or accountability.

Red flags: focusing on export expansion without proven domestic traction, emphasising growth rate without explaining margin, hiring an external firm that was inevitable a mismatch, optimising for a valuation number instead of building a sustainable business.

Pathway Three: Patient Capital for Long-Term Products

Patsy Bass at Reefton Distilling Co. has done multiple successful capital raises while thinking in decades rather than years. The model is familiar to many: gin provides cashflow while whisky matures, cask sales pre-fund future inventory, and capital raises fund infrastructure and scale.

“We articulated our vision clearly since we launched the first capital raise,” Patsy told me. “Our shareholders invested in that vision, in me as Founder and the team we have.”

But articulating the vision was only part of it. Choosing the right partners to execute that vision mattered just as much. “It is all about relationships; about the right people,” Patsy said. “We have a strong relationship with our raise partners and the process is relatively smooth now.”

That relationship building wasn’t accidental. Reefton has worked with boutique investment bank Arcbridge Partners as a raise partner (they also wrangled the Cardrona deal). They’ve also used Snowball Effect for broader retail investor engagement. The key was finding partners who understood the long-term nature of whisky production and believed in the regional economic development story as much as the financial returns.

Trust comes from radical transparency. When global gin markets crashed and recession hit, Patsy didn’t hide it. She explained the pivots, the cost cuts, the hard decisions. They operate on a “no surprises” approach. When you’re asking people to invest in a product that won’t reach its peak for a decade, trust becomes the only currency that matters.

The result: 800+ shareholders who visit the distillery, gift products globally, make introductions, and wear Reefton t-shirts around the world.

The real sophistication shows up in governance. Patsy built a board with the right mix of skills, experience, and personality, then started exploring a COO or GM role to handle operations while she focuses on her strengths.

“One of our early advisors said the entrepreneur with the vision is not typically the right person to run a business once it gets past those first early years,” Patsy said. “And I agree.”

“Once our whisky is ready for market in greater volumes, we won’t need to raise capital to support production,” Patsy noted. The strategy is capital to reach sustainability, not capital as a substitute for sustainability.

This succeeds when you have long-term products requiring patient capital, when you’ve built trust through consistent communication, when you have near-term cashflow generators funding operations while inventory matures, and when you’re comfortable with evolving governance.

It fails when you can’t articulate a clear long-term vision, when you’re not prepared for radical transparency, when you lack cashflow generators and need capital to cover operating expenses, or when you’re working with raise partners who don’t understand your business model or timeline.

Cashflow vs. Capital: The Critical Distinction

It’s easy for distillery founders conflate cashflow management with capital investment. They’re fundamentally different.

Cashflow pays staff, covers rent, buys ingredients, funds marketing. You generate it from sales and manage it by controlling the timing of money in and money out.

Capital funds equipment, builds infrastructure, creates inventory that won’t generate revenue for years, and scales operations.

Reefton’s model demonstrates this clearly. Gin production generates cashflow: product ready quickly, revenue within months, funds ongoing operations. Cask sales create a hybrid: pre-selling future whisky inventory at a discount, generating near-term cashflow while building long-term asset value. Capital raises provide true investment: funding for stills, warehouses, land expansion.

The mistake some make is raising capital thinking it will solve cashflow problems. It won’t. Capital has to fund the long-term. You need revenue-generating products to keep the lights on while your premium inventory matures.

Wills Cameron at Remarkable Cream demonstrates a different version—they’re scaling a proven cashflow-positive model. Their capital went to infrastructure and working capital for scaling, not to funding operating losses.

Blair Nicholl learned this through failure: “Growing without the right working capital turns into a race to the bottom.” They needed to fix their business model, not just inject more capital to cover losses.

Does your business generate positive cashflow from current operations, or are you funding losses? If you’re building aged inventory, what generates cashflow while that inventory matures? Are you raising capital to fund growth or to cover operational shortfalls? Can you time your brand launch to minimise operating costs while maturing and realise the big cash investments upfront?

Raising capital to cover operating losses without a clear path to positive cashflow isn’t fundraising—it’s buying time before failure.

Strategic Alignment Matters More Than Valuation

Before choosing your pathway, work through these questions honestly.

How much revenue do you generate, how consistently, and how profitably? Can you acquire customers at a cost that makes economic sense? Does each sale contribute to covering fixed costs? Without this proof, you’re not ready to raise capital—you’re ready to validate your business model with minimal investment.

What problem does capital actually solve? Scaling a proven model suggests considering all pathways based on amount needed. Building infrastructure for future revenue points toward strategic investors or multiple raises. Funding operating losses means stopping to fix the model first.

How much control are you willing to trade? None? Crowdfunding or friends and family, but accept limited capital and many shareholders. Some? Strategic investors, but accept governance and accountability. Significant? Institutional investors, but accept pressure for exit or returns.

What’s your realistic timeline to profitability? If it’s 12-24 months, bank debt might be cheaper than equity. If it’s 2-5 years, you need strategic investors who understand the model. If it’s 5-10 years, you need patient capital from people who believe in the long game. If it’s unknown, you’re not ready to raise capital.

The Auld Distillery story becomes a cautionary tale here. Auld took on shareholders who, according to Companies Office records, quietly exited the business just two years later. That’s not a normal investment timeline for a distillery—it’s strategic misalignment. When investors exit quietly and quickly, they didn’t understand the business model or timeline, they expected different returns, they weren’t prepared for spirits industry economics, or the founder and investors had fundamentally different visions.

Strategic alignment isn’t about finding investors prepared to give you money. It’s about finding investors who understand your industry’s economics and timelines, share your vision for what the business should become, are prepared for the actual journey rather than an idealised version, and will be there for the long haul—or at least won’t destabilise the business when they exit.

Ask potential investors: What’s your typical investment timeline? What exits have you made from similar businesses, and what triggered them? What would cause you to want to exit this investment early? How do you define success for this investment? What happens if we don’t hit projected milestones but the business is still viable?

If their answers don’t align with your vision and timeline, keep looking. The wrong investors are worse than no investors.

What happens if you can’t raise capital? If the business fails, your model is broken and capital won’t fix it. If growth slows, you have a sustainable business and capital is optional acceleration.

What Actually Matters

Build revenue before you build the pitch deck—proof, not projection.
Choose partners who believe in what you’ve already built.
Match your valuation to your investor type.
Be radically transparent. When things go wrong, tell people. When hard decisions come, explain why.
Know exactly where every dollar goes.

A serious business leader knows how to spend other people’s money well. It starts with ensuring strategic alignment with investors, but how exactly should you do that?

From inside the process, here’s my advice and backed up by the stories above. You need to ask the hard questions about investor timelines, expectations, and definitions of success before taking their money. And listen to what people tell you.
You may not have your governance gold wings, but understand that good governance is your best competitive advantage. The businesses surviving downturns have smart people around the table who help founders see blind spots before those blind spots become crises. Be sure all all times, you are distinguishing between cashflow and capital. You’ll regret sinking the capital that was going to propel you forward on everyday operating costs. Profitability and margin are not optional in the current climate—even if when you started, sustained losses were okay with the accountant. Profit is the only reliable long-term strategy.

Investment Isn’t The Success

Securing capital—regardless of amount or source—is just a transaction. The question that matters is simpler: what do you actually want this business to do?

Maybe you’re building for local employment, like Reefton creating jobs on the West Coast where they’re desperately needed. Maybe you’re building for sustainable work you enjoy, like Blair. Maybe you’re building quality products that reflect craft and place and family legacy. Or maybe you’re genuinely building for global scale. That’s legitimate. But understand what that path requires: Four Pillars spent a decade becoming genuinely world-class before their exit. You need to run a good business to grow or sell one. You don’t become a better business operator once you have more money (or more production) in the bank.

Capital has gravity. Once you take it, your business bends toward the expectations that came with it.

Wills Cameron told me something that cuts through the noise: “I’d rather turn a profit and grow slowly than chase capital and hope the growth covers the cost.”

The Counter-Argument: Choosing Not To Raise At All

Rachael Thomson at Thomson Whisky took a different path entirely. She and Mat chose to grow organically, reinvesting profits back into production rather than taking on external investors. They kept their day jobs until the business turned a profit—literally didn’t take a wage for years.

“Those years were hard and home felt like a train station with all the comings and goings between jobs,” Rachael told me. “I had 2 girls under 4 years old and the business was growing at like 70% at that time, so I was averaging about 5 hours sleep a night between breastfeeding, home life and working. I was selling whisky over the phone, doing the accounts, brand work, and also dispatching whisky orders from home.”

She describes putting the baby in the pushchair with cases of whisky in the compartment below, wheeling them down the long driveway to the courier box for pickup. “Looking back I sound like a character from a Roald Dahl book,” she said.

The sacrifice was brutal. “You do everything you need to do without reasonable limits, and the business takes from you what it needs, not the other way around. But if you want something others don’t have, you have to be prepared to do things others aren’t.”

The benefits of remaining family-owned? “You make decisions that will benefit your family long term. You have everyone’s futures clearly in your sights and you want to see your family succeed and thrive, and the distillery gives you possibilities for that. It becomes an enabler and a source of real pride. And when you look back it’s hugely satisfying that you’ve created it. You took the risk, got off the bleachers, and ran the race, instead of being a bystander. It gives you purpose.”

Rachael isn’t against investment as a concept. “Taking investment in a company is not a bad thing at all, and it’s certainly a really smart option for many models. Capital is king as they say, but nothing comes for free. It shouldn’t be jumped into without careful consideration, and extrapolating out in your mind where it will lead over years.”

Her observation about the New Zealand market is sharp: “There’s a tendency for small NZ brands to under value their businesses and go for investment too early. They let go of too much of their shareholding before they’ve solved some fundamental business issues that sets them up for growth—and at times end up going for multiple rounds of investment and losing more share.”

Her advice: “You have to ask yourself what your end game is, what do you want to be or do within the biz long term, and who do you want along side you. Every business owner will have a different version of what ‘success’ looks like for them and it’s good to be honest about it, and go after your version of success, not the cookie cutter model.”

Thomson Whisky now has international recognition, awards, distribution in Australia and Europe, and a sustainable business that supports two households. They got there by selling bottles to make more whisky, reinvesting profits, and building slowly enough that they never had to compromise on what they were creating or who they were creating it with.

It’s a valid path. Maybe the most valid one for distilleries that can generate enough revenue to fund their own growth. Because the business remains entirely theirs to shape, grow, and eventually pass on—or not—as they choose.

Choose Your Hard. Choose What Success Looks Like.

Right now you have possibly already thought how another $100,000 in capital could solve problems for you. Maybe three or four times over. But have you considered what success actually looks like for your distillery? Seeing your product in 25 countries, or knowing the people who work for you have stable jobs? Selling for eight figures, or waking up each day doing work you enjoy in a business that pays you well?

The spirits industry has spent two decades telling founders that the only success that matters is scale and exit. But in 2025, when buyers are divesting more than acquiring, when exits rarely transform businesses, and when building acquisition-worthy businesses requires a decade of world-class execution, success needs a more honest definition.

Maybe success is building a distillery that does exactly what you want it to do. Know which one you’re building. Be honest with yourself, your investors, your team. The capital you raise and how you raise it should serve that specific version of success—not distort it, not replace it, and certainly not become the goal itself.

Before you build that pitch deck, ask yourself: if this business never exits, never scales beyond regional distribution, never makes you wealthy—but it employs good people, makes products you’re proud of, pays you a decent living, and lets you do meaningful work—would that be enough?

If the answer is yes, build that business. Raise capital to support it if needed, but never let capital requirements distort what you’re building. Or follow Rachael’s path: reinvest profits, grow sustainably, maintain complete control over your vision.

If the answer is no—if you genuinely want global scale and eventual exit—understand the path is brutal, long, and requires a decade of world-class execution with no guarantees.

Matt Johns is mid-sentence about 30-year-old sherry butts when a guy on a motorbike rolls up to the Pōkeno distillery. Apparently this happens every four months—a UK-based fan who occasionally lives somewhere in New Zealand, rides around and pops in unannounced to say hello. There’s no question that we pause our conversation and it’s a nice reminder that behind every savvy piece of branding, the customer relationship will always take priority. After a quick hello, Matt returns to our chat about some of the oldest and most precious casks in the warehouse.

“The 30-year-old sherry butts were really interesting because they gave us a dried fruit, but not a massive PX (Pedro Ximénez sherry) influence,” he says. “So it accentuated the fruitiness of our natural grapefruit, orange, lemon, but it didn’t bring as much of the PX as I might have expected. It gave more of a dried fruit, figgy notes to it, which I would have almost associated with an old red wine cask.”

Pedro Ximénez casks usually offer rich, syrupy sweetness that accentuates molasses and chocolate in whisky, rather than the drier, nuttier effect of Oloroso cask maturation. But that’s typical in Scotland. What PX casks would do in the new world, in this instance Pōkeno’s humid and variable valley, was previously unknown.

This is what we’re here to talk about: Alchemy, Pōkeno’s newest core range release. Three and a half years in the making, six different cask types, some of the distillery’s oldest stock.

Going All In

Matt has always been methodical about releases. The core range launched in June 2022 with Origin, a bourbon-cask expression designed to prove a point.

“I wanted to prove that we could make a really good whisky in New Zealand in a short period of time; because of the climatic conditions, because of the quicker maturation, and I wasn’t going to hide behind other barrel types,” he says. “That’s Pōkeno, that’s who we are. It’s our fantastically fruity, smooth, easy drink.”

Origin did its job. Discovery followed—a sherry-influenced sibling. Then came the Exploration Series for the truly experimental work, and single casks for the showcase moments. The initial core lineup was working, especially some of the single cask releases showcasing local beer collaborations and native wood.

But it came time to start looking at those stocks differently. My first visits to the site were clear: the Pōkeno team were filling warehouses full of ‘ingredients’, a wide variety of casks that would create options and discoveries of flavour. A catalogue of how the influence of the valley might collaborate with very old, very good cask stocks to produce blendable components.

“You’re going through the warehouse, you’re looking at your stocks, you’re looking at the range, you’re looking at what’s going on in the market,” Johns explains. “And I think as a brand, we’re evolving more and more to the fact that we always said from the start that we’re very proud of making New Zealand whisky in New Zealand, that we’re not making a Scotch whisky in New Zealand.”

The idea started percolating: what if they went all in? Not just on New Zealand provenance, but on complexity, boldness, a showcase of everything Pōkeno hadn’t yet released. And put it into core range product.

“I’d never gone in for that big, bold, massive product before,” Johns admits. “And we’d got some feedback from people saying, ‘When are you doing a sherry bomb? When are you doing this?’ So I’m looking at the stocks, going, ‘Okay, well, if I’m going to play around with something, we’re going to go big, we’re going to go bold, and we’re going to go creative—not only on the product, but on the packaging as well.’”

He had to wait. Some of the casks he wanted to use were good, but they’d be better with more time.

How Alchemy Got Its Name

The name came from an odd place. Johns and his team were talking Weta Studios, discussing making casks for a film set. Someone mentioned Lord of the Rings. Wizards. Potions.

“I kind of went, ‘Ah, potions, wizards, Alchemy,’” Johns recalls. “And I’m thinking blending, the art of the old school... Hold on a second, there might be something here.”

Then he was in Dunedin, looking at street art, and something clicked. The aesthetic, the vibe, the sense of creative alchemy—it melded together. They brought in a Japanese-Kiwi street artist for the packaging. The result looks nothing like traditional whisky, which is the point.

The liquid is where it gets technical. Six cask types: 15-year-old PX hogsheads, 30-year-old PX butts, tawny port, ruby port, light toast virgin American oak, medium toast virgin American oak. Some of the stock is over five and a half years old—ancient by Pōkeno standards. All full maturation, no finishing shortcuts.

“This is not something that we’ve gone, ‘F**k, we need to do this product, we’ll stick stuff in for finishing and shortcut it,’” Johns says emphatically. “This has been full maturation, all of these different cask types, and we had to wait until we had enough stock coming on board in the next two years to be able to maintain the product if we’re going to launch it.”

How Six Casks Work Together

The challenge was making six strong personalities play nicely together. The 30-year-old butts brought depth but risked going flat—”almost like when you have a Bordeaux which is a bit overaged, which is going on that serious kind of side, maybe a bit too woody,” Johns explains. The 15-year-old hogsheads provided the vibrancy—”that fresh bang of PX fruitiness, the ripe cherries, the Black Forest gateau, everything you’d expect.”

They couldn’t use just the butts. “There was depth coming from the butts, but I needed the vibrancy from the hoggies.” The blend uses more hogsheads than butts because “the dried fruit can be overpowering, and I lose the vibrancy.”

Then came the virgin oak—light toast for body without excessive spice, medium toast for “lovely caramel, biscuity butterscotch.” And finally, the port, pushed to 20% of the blend.

“It was really interesting for me that the port shows at the back end,” Johns says, still sounding somewhat mystified. “At the start, I was going, ‘Wow, I just can’t get the port to show,’ but it shows at the back end... You get right to the end of the product and the finish, and it’s almost pure port. The last thing—you wait for the first five, ten seconds, then the back end is almost pure port.”

As I finish this story, I can’t help but agree.

Matt’s approach to blending is that of storyteller and architect. He wants the blend to be harmonious in how it works together but he’s laying out a beginning, middle and end. The result is multi-dimensional in a way that demonstrates the intentionality of the blender. There’s a real journey going on.

“For me, the product is multi-layered,” Johns says. “You’ve got the PX, but the port really kicks in at the end. The virgin gives it the body, the PX gives it those notes everybody’s looking for, but the port gives it the length of the back end and that additional layer of fruitiness.”

With some of Pōkeno’s oldest stock, multiple expensive cask types, and significant investment in packaging, the question of approachable pricing must be asked.

“We don’t want this to be a special edition selling at 250 bucks a bottle, which it could have been,” he says. “This is us continuing to give the consumer products which are affordable at a price point they can taste and drink, and trying to give something which people want to have on the shelves.”

The pricing sits in sharp contrast to some (not all) New Zealand whisky. There are two paths emerging — affordable price points for regular whisky lovers or premium pricing for collectors, gifting and the one-off purchaser. Matt is clear about which path Pōkeno is taking.

“You can sell anything to anybody once,” Johns says. “But if you want your brand to be drunk, tasted, enjoyed and bought again, make it accessible.”

When we talk about the broader industry, he comes back to this point repeatedly. As a New World whisky producer, how do you justify being double or triple the price of Scotland?

“They’re still buying the barley, they’re still buying the wood, they’re still laying it down for three years. Yes, they’ve got economies of scale, but they’ve still got all those processes and costs. How can we justify being double their price or triple their price? We can’t. There is absolutely no justification.”

He allows for a 15% premium based on smaller scale, longer fermentations, slower distillations, higher transport costs. “But you can’t multiply by three and go, ‘I’m a New Zealand whisky, buy me.’ Or ‘I’m an Australian whisky...’ And the Australians are worse than us at doing that.”

What Alchemy Tells Us

Since I first started writing stories about Pōkeno and tasting her young spirit, there’s been a sense of quest and adventure, an air of anticipation about what Pōkeno spirit can handle, what we might discover about our own whisky-making climate.

“What Alchemy has taught me is that my new make spirit can support heavier casks, which I wasn’t convinced it could at the start. It shows that our new make spirit, although it is fruity and light, is also robust because you’re still getting the fruitiness of Pōkeno through Alchemy even though it’s got all of those incredibly powerful casks blended into it.”

This matters for a young industry still figuring out its identity. At five and a half years, Johns was worried his bourbon casks were getting too woody, losing fruitiness, picking up “notes of woody spice which I wasn’t overly fond of.” But at six and a half, seven years? “This evolved again. That woody spice has gone, and we’re back on the fruits, but accompanied by butterscotch, caramel, some of the more Scottish notes.”

The climate remains a moving target. “Today we’re on a journey—in 20 years time, ask me the question if I’m still around, but we’re not far enough in that journey to really know what the climate’s going to do to us in the next five or six years.”

His advice to other makers: “I’d say never be afraid to make mistakes. I’m still throwing stuff into new casks today that I’ve never tried before, that I’ve got no idea what it will be like in four or five years time, but if you don’t do it, you’ll never know.”

He pauses, then adds: “I’m sitting here today looking at Alchemy going, ‘Thank God I filled those PX butts and those old port casks five, six years ago, because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to do this.’”

Native Wood: Not a Gimmick

We also talk about Pōkeno’s native wood program—specifically, how perception measures it as marketing or genuine exploration. “For me, it’s not a marketing gimmick,” Johns says. “If it was, I’d have brought out six different native wood casks already, and it would have been done, and you’d have a set, a series, it would have been a little kind of trunk and you could... but it’s not. For me, it has to add something to the product.”

So far, they’ve found one wood that works fantastically: Totara. They get enough to make ten casks a year. “We sell all the Totara we’ve got. A couple thousand bottles a year. It’s shipped around the world, and that’s it.”

The kauri took two and a half years to come good after initial disappointment. “Six months after filling the kauri cask, we said, ‘This is never going in a bottle, it’s shit.’ Two and a half years later, it came good.” They’ve got enough kauri for one more cask, which might be the last one ever if they can’t source more wood.

And then there’s the New Zealand oak story, which perfectly encapsulates the trial-and-error reality of making whisky somewhere new. They sourced heartwood, dried it carefully, made a barrel. Thankfully they filled it with water first, on Matt’s instinct just to check.

“It literally went like that through the wood,” Johns says, making a whooshing gesture. They tried again with different wood, being more vigilant about heartwood, no sap. Same result.

Deep dive into the problem revealed that robur oak in Europe takes 100 years to grow. In New Zealand, it takes 40. What makes our fast-growing climate great for pine is terrible for oak, which will make the whisky nerds go a-ha. Our European and Scottish colleagues are a hundred-plus years into the business, so they understand that nurturing your forests is as important as the barley when it comes to whisky-making.

“The structure of the wood is just not concentrated or tight enough to hold liquid. You will never have a New Zealand oak wood barrel. It’s impossible. But until we built two barrels, gone down that path and did it, we didn’t know that.”

Building a Category While Building a Brand

When we shift to discussing exports and market realities, Johns’ frustration with the current whisky landscape becomes palpable. Pōkeno is one of the few New Zealand distilleries genuinely moving volume internationally—they’re in 30 markets—but even that success comes with caveats.

“The world is not waiting for a New Zealand whisky,” he says plainly. “The world is not waiting for an Australian whisky, or a Japanese gin, or whatever. Markets are overstocked. Whether you’re talking about retailers, wholesalers, importers—everybody’s overstocked. The big brands are still pushing stock to market because they’ve got to report to the industry that their share price is performing, so they’re throwing incredibly aggressive commercial deals all over the place, which has widened the gap between New World whisky and scotch whisky.”

Two years ago, Pōkeno was a niche, interesting product that people were excited about. Now? “You’re a hard-to-sell. And when you’re a hard-to-sell, it means you get no focus, which means you sit on a shelf somewhere at the bottom of a little independent retail store, which nobody’s got a hope of seeing when they walk into the store unless somebody’s going to talk about it.”

The only way forward is liquid on lips, building customer by customer, old school. “A small business like ourselves can only do so much of that. We’re out there fighting the good fight.”

Next year, instead of focusing on 30 international markets, they’ll focus on five. “How do we build those five to be a real success story and make sure that we’re positioned for when the markets take off again?”

What It Actually Tastes Like

My first taste was in a liquor store, in one of those tiny plastic cups. Not ideal. At home, in proper glassware, with time: different story.

When I tell Johns what I think, I talk about the depth and complexity. “That classic Pōkeno new make, which is sweet, fruit forward, designed to have this light, expressive kind of bounciness—you described it as vibrancy—it still stays pretty true throughout the whole thing.”

I’m a Totara fan, partly for the story and knowing about the experiment, but also because that candy, tropical fruit, the coconut really sings through. With Alchemy, I went in wondering: will I be able to pull out the individual influences? How is the difference between light and medium toast actually playing out? How is it all blending together?

“For me, what’s most exciting about this is that it’s a showcase of blending. Taking these ingredients and creating something that offers much more than the sum of the individual parts. I’d still love to taste all the individual parts, because they’re doing such a lovely job. But the way the fruit develops and changes in the glass over time is probably what sings out most.”

Not a story about wood, even with six cask types. The length carries nice and big and juicy—doesn’t get too dry and velvety at the end, which I’d sometimes expect with that amount of those kind of velvet tannins, the syrupy nature of PX. It stays beautiful, long, juicy all the way through.

“It’s balanced, it’s long, it’s got complexity and depth. Straightforward words, but that’s what I’d hope for. It’s just delicious.”

And validating: here’s something that shows yes, we can have humid valley temperature fluctuation, things we’d expect to have certain impacts. But out of that can still come something very juicy, very sweet, with lots of pliability. “The intensity of its climate, its age, hasn’t stripped away. It’s added to. That’s really exciting.”

For the category, this feels like the most exciting development in a while. Not because it’s laced with sherry and port influence—though I naturally enjoy those things. But because pour it into a glass, look at it on a shelf, and there’s a sense of quality and a sense of “I’m going to enjoy this.” It’s a cask play that actually tastes really good.

Johns nods. “I think it’s important the consumer understands you can make a fantastic complex New Zealand whisky and still put it out there at a price point which isn’t crazy. And I think it’s important as an industry, that’s what we need to be doing. We need to recruit the consumer. We just need to show them what we can do and that we can stand up against anything else.”

It’s nowhere near the end of the journey, he’s quick to add. It’s a stage, a milestone. “We were ready to do that now, and then we’ll see what the next part of the journey looks like.”

Alchemy by Pōkeno Whisky, 46% ABV, RRP $149

Two stories caught my attention this week. Get ready to cringe as we walk through how we’re apparently talking about alcohol in 2025.

First: “Gin and tonic is the least harmful alcoholic drink” (because quinine! because white spirits!).

Second: “Teenage binge drinking leads to greater success in life” (because social capital! because confidence!).

One wellness-washes gin into a harm-reduction strategy. The other sent parents into panic with headlines about teenage binge drinking—before revealing that alcohol’s relationship to success has nothing to do with the alcohol itself. Together, they expose how our cultural conversation around drinking has stripped out the fun, injected social status anxiety and shame-inducing contradictions where nobody wins.

We’ve arrived at a place where every discussion about alcohol ends up in codified social norms (”here’s the less harmful choice”) or moral panic (”no amount is safe!”). We measure alcohol units, calculate risk ratios and debate resveratrol content and argue about safe consumption limits. And somewhere along the way, we’ve stripped all the joy, all the human connection, all the experience out of the conversation.

Absurdly, what science actually tells us is that the fun—the social fabric, the emotional and intellectual wellbeing that comes from genuine human connection—is the most important part of how we drink. No binge required.

So let’s be clear about what gets conveniently left out of every “least harmful drink” article and wellness guide that treats your gin and tonic like a medical intervention:

It’s not what we’re drinking. It’s how we’re drinking.

As someone who drinks for a living, I often feel the shadow of booze-shame. It’s what I’ve coined the uncomfortable shadow— the pressure and expectation that on a night out that I will naturally push the boat out, keep up with the gang, that I’ll always open another bottle or be down for shots. Or conversely—in a world where everyone’s talking about sobriety, I feel the need to explain I do drink moderately, that sometimes it’s just my job and that I don’t have to drink every night—although, I mostly do. Even when it’s not for work. Booze-shame is the anxiety of feeling like my choices are now part of a public conversation because so much public messaging is ‘alcohol is bad’.

Booze-shame pushes us to the binary edges of self-assessment: either having a problem or being completely fine, when most of us would probably benefit sooner from an healthier alcohol conversation that is judgment & anxiety-free. One with moderation actually in the centre. Because alcohol conversations have become so serious in every corner, it’s getting harder to see what a socialised, healthy alcohol culture might look like.

Which brings us back to those headlines. Buried in the wellness-washing and the panic is something actually useful:

Bourbon neat at a dinner table with friends beats bourbon and coke with a cigarette at a bar where you’re drinking to forget.

A glass of wine with a long meal beats three glasses alone on your couch because Tuesday was hard.

Champagne at a wedding beats bottomless prosecco at brunch where you’re just trying to survive the Sunday Scaries.

But which three scenarios do we hear about most? Headlines sag under the weight of how bad drinking alone, drinking to forget, and drinking through depression is for our bodies, our brains and our relationships. I want to remind you how joyous it can be to enjoy a good drink of whatever you like, in a setting that lifts you up. When we inject shame into the conversation, we remove the positive impacts that drinking contexts offer.

That Norwegian study that went viral this week? University of Oslo sociologist Willy Pedersen found that those who drank socially in their late teens and twenties had higher education and income levels—while those who started drinking heavily in early teens were less successful, and those who drank alone showed no career benefits whatsoever. As he explained: “The most likely explanation is that all alcohol is a kind of marker of sociality and that habit comes with some types of benefits”.

It was never about the drinking. It was about the social capital, the connections, the confidence built through communal experience. The alcohol was just... there.

If you’ve ever felt anxious about whether you’re drinking too much or too little, whether you ordered the “right” drink, whether you should justify that second glass or explain why you’re stopping at one—you’re not alone. The entire cultural conversation has been designed to make you feel this way.

This is the social messaging that has seen New Zealand’s alcohol consumption per capita drop by 30% since the mid-1980s. And as for the latest edition of wellness-washed ‘least harmful choice’ claims? The gin and tonic can sit right alongside these choices:

Mezcal neat — because agave is a vegetable, and vegetables are good for you. Definitely healthier than a salt-rimmed Margarita while stress-eating fried chicken at midnight.

Single malt whisky — rich in antioxidants from all that oak barrel aging. Far superior to whisky and Coke with self-loathing on the side.

Vodka soda with fresh lime — basically a vitamin C supplement at this point. Much more virtuous than vodka Red Bull at 2am when you’re already three bad decisions deep.

Garibaldi — you’re practically doing a juice cleanse. The citrus aids digestion, restores electrolytes. Infinitely healthier than tequila slammers followed by a kebab and the certainty you’ll nail karaoke tonight.

Champagne — the bubbles aid digestion, darling.

Negroni — taken for the botanicals of course, and definitely not three Negronis deep and texting your ex.

The quinine in tonic exists in such infinitesimal amounts it couldn’t ward off a particularly lazy mosquito. But the mozzie will make the effort for the added sugar in your bloodstream. You’d need roughly forty G&Ts to get anywhere near a therapeutic dose for leg cramps, at which point you’d have far bigger problems than your calves.

The Myths That Let Us Ignore Context

We fixate on the contents of the glass because it’s easier than examining why and where we’re holding it. So we tell ourselves stories:

“White spirits are easier on your body.” No. The reason you feel better after vodka than red wine isn’t purity—it’s the absence of congeners, those flavour compounds that can contribute to hangovers. But you know what contributes more to hangovers? Drinking too much.

“The quinine in tonic water is good for you.” If you’re drinking G&Ts for health benefits, you’re essentially trying to prevent malaria while giving yourself liver disease. The colonial-era antimalarial properties have been diluted into marketing copy, not medicine.

“Red wine is good for your heart.” The resveratrol debate. Yes, there are compounds in red wine that show promise in laboratory conditions. There are also compounds that are literally poison, which is why your liver works overtime. The “Mediterranean diet” studies that made red wine look beneficial were never able to separate the wine from everything else—the social eating, the vegetables, the olive oil, the walking, the not being chronically stressed. Correlation isn’t causation, and “moderate” means less than most people think.

Welcome to the wellness wash.

We do it with chocolate milk after workouts (perfect protein-to-carb ratio! Never mind you’ve consumed more sugar than you burned). We do it with green juice cleanses (detoxifying enzymes! Ignore the stripped fiber and fruit-punch sugar levels trying to do a job your body does naturally). We do it with kombucha (gut health! Don’t think about how some brands contain more alcohol and sugar than light beer).

The pattern is always the same: isolate one beneficial component, ignore all context, declare something “healthy,” and give yourself permission to over-consume while feeling virtuous.

But this thinking is particularly dangerous with alcohol because the context we’re ignoring is often the thing actually harming us.

What Context Actually Means

The most dangerous drinking isn’t the messy nights or dramatic binges. It’s the kind of drinking that doesn’t feature meaningful connection, and only offers escape.

”Mate, have you got time for a beer?” Recent studies show that solitary drinking is strongly associated with increased risk of alcohol use disorder and negative health outcomes, even after controlling for the amount consumed. The problem isn’t drinking alone occasionally—it’s drinking because you’re alone. Or being alone because you’re drinking. The context reveals the pattern, and the pattern reveals the problem.

Meanwhile, research on Mediterranean drinking patterns has often been used to justify that glass or two of red wine. It often ignores the most important part of why the Mediterranean way seem to work—it’s characterised by moderate wine consumption with meals, spread throughout the week, and accompanied by food. And again: this pattern occurs within a broader Mediterranean lifestyle that includes social meals and strong community connection

It’s not the wine. It’s the table. The people around it. The food, conversation, music, laughter, ritual of shared experience. Okay, that bit might be about the wine.

During the pandemic, alcohol sales went through the roof - but research has revealed that when young heavy drinkers lost access to social drinking contexts, their alcohol consumption and related problems decreased substantially—not because alcohol became less available, but because the social context changed. Without bars and parties, drinking lost its social scaffolding. What remained was just the drinking, and many people realised they didn’t actually want it.

This is why the International Academy of Wine’s 2025 statement to the UN matters: “It is dangerous to reduce wine to a health risk, because this overlooks its cultural, social, and human dimensions.”

They’re right, even if they have commercial interests. The WHO’s stance that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption is technically accurate from a pure health perspective, but it flattens something important: the difference between drinking embedded in social connection and drinking as a substitute for it.

Social connection itself—independent of alcohol—is what drives wellbeing and longevity. The Mediterranean pattern works not because of the wine, but because it’s embedded in a culture of genuine human connection.

Remember, that’s the fun bit. The laughing, the shared experiences, the awakening of the senses. Whether wine, whisky or agua fresca—liquid refreshment with friends and family is essential to good health.

What Actually Matters (And What Doesn’t)

Remember when drinking was allowed to be fun? Not optimised, not justified, not measured against health metrics—just fun. Somewhere between “gin prevents malaria” and “no amount is safe,” we lost permission to simply enjoy a drink with people we like. That’s what needs to come back.

If you’re going to drink, the only thing that matters is ‘are you present?’ Are you connected? Are you having the kind of fun you’ll remember, not the kind you’ll need to forget?

The drinking that doesn’t hurt you is presence, not absence. Connection, not escape. It’s about the conversation that makes you think differently, the music that makes you feel something, the food that anchors the experience in pleasure rather than intoxication.

And bloody hell, when did you last see an alcohol brand that was genuinely expressing this fun without resorting to day-glo RTD cans? The booze barons need to remember this too: drinks need joy, not just health monitoring and whisky wank. Let there be laughter and frolicking (it is possible in moderation, you know!). Let there be festivals and flavours and the kind of fun the term ‘social lubrication’ was inspired from.

The healthiest drinking choice isn’t about antioxidants or congeners or which spirit your liver prefers. It’s choosing a way of drinking that enhances your connection to life and other people. And crucially, it’s about preserving your ability to choose not to drink at all. And for that also to be fun. Because if the social connection is there—the laughter, the conversation, the shared experience—the drink becomes optional. And that’s when you know you’re doing it right.

The language we use around alcohol matters because it shapes how we think about our relationship with it. Calling a gin and tonic “least harmful” isn’t just reductive—it’s actively combative. It gives us permission to ignore the context, the patterns, the creeping dependencies. It lets us pretend optimisation is the same as examination. But it also takes the fun out of gin, which didn’t really need any help with that. Oh wait—that’s another myth. Gin doesn’t make you sad. Drinking badly makes you sad.

If you’ve ever felt anxious about drinking the “right” amount or the “right” way, this cultural conversation has failed you. Your choice of drink has never mattered as your motivation in reaching for it. And good ol’ healthy fun is perfectly acceptable motivation too.

So here’s your permission slip: drink what you like, with people who make you laugh, in moments that matter. The gin doesn’t need to prevent anything. The wine doesn’t need antioxidants. You don’t need to justify the second glass or explain stopping at one.

The only measure that matters is whether you’re drinking with your life or drinking at it. Whether you’re there for the connection or the escape. Whether tomorrow you’ll remember the conversation or need to apologise for it.

That’s it. That’s the whole guide.

The best part was never what was in the glass. It was always the people around it.