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

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.

So I wrote a little article this week about the Michelin thing, and there were a lot of new faces around here. Not to mention, sometimes it’s important to explain things. So here’s a little manifesto to help you find your way around More Good Drinks!

There’s a moment—you know the one—where the liquid hits the glass just so, the sound inviting you in before you’ve even lifted it to your lips. Maybe it’s whisky unfurling like smoke signals across crystal. Maybe it’s wine exhaling three continents of sunlight. Maybe it’s that first cold beer after the kind of week that ages you in dog years.

And here’s what happens next: someone asks what you’re drinking, and suddenly you’re not just tasting—you’re talking. At first it’s hops and juniper and forest floor and ‘have you tried this one yet?’ but then it’s ‘how was your day?’ and ‘what are we going to do about that? and ‘how can I help, mate?’

That conversation? That’s where More Good Drinks lives. In the space where curiosity meets craft, where a sip becomes a story, and where what we drink reveals who we are.

You Can’t Miss What You Don’t Have

Most drinks writing falls into two camps now: breathless press releases where journalism is also marketing activity, or coded insider language that might make you feel like you need a degree to order a drink. And then there’s the booze-shame, the feeling that even if you drink responsibly, we’re just not meant to have too much fun with drinks right? Except I’m obsessed with peach soda and there’s nothing guilty in that.

Here’s what gets lost in that gap: the story.

New Zealand’s media landscape has already retracted. If you’re in your twenties, you don’t remember when food and drink journalism was rich and deep—that’s what TikTok is for now. You can’t miss what you never had.

But I think that makes great stories even more meaningful. In an ocean of 60-second hot takes and sponsored content, journalism that actually goes deep stands out. Writing that takes time, asks hard questions, and follows threads until they make sense cuts through the noise precisely because so little else does.

Independent journalism—the kind where someone spends an hour with a distiller instead of rewriting a press release, where calling out false advertising is still possible—comes at a cost in a world that despises a paywall.

But you deserve writing that cuts through the marketing, explains why something tastes the way it does, introduces you to the humans behind what you’re drinking, and respects your intelligence without requiring a sommelier certificate.

That’s what More Good Drinks does.

The Joy & The Technique

Our mission is simple: More Good Drinks.

First, the joy. Drinks should be fun. Alcoholic content shouldn’t impact fun content. Remember when you used to put Raro straight on your tongue, seeing how sugar you could dissolve in a litre of water before your teeth buzzed? Debating whether Milo was better hot or cold? The irresistible thrill of a fizzy from the dairy on a hot summer’s day when you’d been playing with your mates. The relationship between good drinking experiences and fun started the first time you tried slipping Mentos into a Coke bottle. And you might have even tried adding bubbles to your wine using the Soda Stream you got for Christmas. Then maybe you explored the first sip of a perfectly made Negroni and laughed til you cried at how it made your sinuses burn. The discovery that you love mezcal when you thought you hated tequila. The wine that tastes exactly like summer in Central Otago because that’s precisely what it is. Pleasurable—even if it’s cold fruit juice when you’re sick or a Golden Pash from the servo. Memory, senses, taste buds alive.

Then, the technique. You’re spending your money and time—you deserve honest answers. Which alternative nootropic beverages are genuinely innovative and which are expensive snake oil? What does “low-intervention winemaking” actually mean? Why are craft distilleries struggling and what does that mean for what’s available to you? Wouldn’t you love it if drinks menus were as thoroughly reviewed as what comes across the pass?

We celebrate the good. We call out the rubbish. We explain the complex without dumbing it down.

Who’s Behind This

I’ve spent two decades in this industry—tasting, yes, but mostly learning. I’ve worked inside New Zealand’s tourism strategy machinery, consulted for brands navigating impossible markets, judged spirits competitions from Auckland to London, and been shortlisted for international awards alongside writers I’ve studied for years.

I’ve facilitated whisky regulation negotiations and led Food Writers New Zealand as food writing has undergone significant change. I’ve served cocktails on breakfast television and written analysis that makes industry leaders uncomfortable.

But here’s what matters more than credentials: I’m still curious. Still discovering. Still excited when someone makes something genuinely new. Still frustrated when industry has short-term vision.

Dave Broom taught me you can be technically rigorous and poetically expressive at once. That expertise should illuminate, not intimidate. That’s the approach here.

What You’ll Find: Three Ways We Pour

1. This Tastes Good:

Honest reviews that help you navigate the shelf. We separate genuine innovation from expensive marketing. That $120 gin? We’ll tell you if it’s worth it or if you should spend $80 and save the rest. We’ll tell you the reason why this is no ordinary cocktail. Alternative beverages delivering impact versus adaptogens in pretty bottles. Non-alcoholic spirits that truly bottle complexity without ethanol. And occasionally we may give you a Best of the Best list of products that really caught our eye.

2. Drinks Leaders: Their Stories

The humans behind what we’re drinking. The distiller betting everything on a botanical no one’s heard of. The winemaker deciding whether to pour vintage down the drain or gamble on one more year. The bartender building a menu around ingredients most people throw away. The importer bringing you drinks with centuries of cultural meaning. The people making decisions that impact your fun and your options.

3. Full Pour: The Stories That Shape Our Liquid World

The big, complicated questions with real consequences:

Questions I’m asking right now: While France pours vintage down the drain and Australian vineyards rip out vines, New Zealand winemakers face a defining question—compete on volume or bet everything on quality?

Why hasn’t Western culture embraced tepache, horchata, and milk tea as culturally refined non-alcoholic options when they are entire beverage philosophies with centuries of story?

And for those in the industry, the bigger questions of strategy, food systems and how people are changing the way they engage with the drinks industry altogether. Those stories matter for everyone, because they are inevitably stories of culture being shaped and formed.

Why This Actually Matters

What we drink is how we connect. How we celebrate and commiserate. How we mark time and memory. How we welcome strangers and deepen friendships. How we signal identity and share culture.

A good drink is a time machine, a conversation starter, comfort and adventure at once. The visceral experience of tasting—that shock of flavour, that revelation of texture—is how we learn our world, how we understand place, how we connect with each other.

That deserves better than press releases and tasting notes. That deserves a bit of time. A bit of care.

What You’re Supporting

When you subscribed, you joined a community of curious food & drink lovers who refuse to settle. You’re supporting independent drinks journalism that answers to readers, not advertisers. And I haven’t even asked you for a dollar yet.

More Good Drinks exists because what’s good to drink should also be good for the people making it, good for the places it comes from, and part of a good life. But not so Good we forget that it’s meant to be fun.

Good product. Good taste. Good business. Good health.

Pull Up a Chair

If you’re a curious drinker who wants the stories behind the bottles, the truth beneath the marketing, the context that makes every sip richer—this is your table.

Pour yourself something good now.

Tash McGill is a drinks writer and industry consultant who’s spent twenty years learning this business from the inside out. IWSC Spirits Communicator Trophy finalist, former President of the NZ Food Writers Guild—but more importantly, still excited to discover something new in a glass.

Six million dollars to bring the Michelin Guide to New Zealand, and the country has collectively lost its mind. The good news is that this time, everyone arguing is a little bit right.

But here’s my favourite detail: Tourism New Zealand spent $6.3 million to secure Michelin, then immediately had to budget for crisis PR management because - plot twist - nobody could agree if it was brilliant or catastrophic.

“Michelin Guide partnership: $6.3m. Explaining why we did it: TBC.”

The outrage merchants are in full throat: “Moral bankruptcy!” “What about Cuisine?” “People are hungry!” “Australia said no!” Meanwhile, I can tell you - having spent over three years with Tourism New Zealand - pitching food and wine activity every step of the way based on what travellers told us they actually wanted to know: the real scandal isn’t the $6.3 million.

It’s that we’re showcasing our disconnected, binary understanding of food and tourism, two of our biggest exports and industries.

The Problem Nobody’s Naming

Here’s what the Michelin hysteria is really exposing: New Zealand has no government agency responsible for food as a complete system.

Think about it:

• Tourism NZ promotes food to international visitors ✓

• Ministry of Primary Industries manages biosecurity and primary production ✓

• Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment oversees hospitality sector compliance ✓

• Ministry of Health issues nutrition guidelines ✓

• Ministry of Education manages education pathways and qualifications ✓

But nobody owns the connective tissue. Nobody links:

• Tourism promotion → hospitality careers pipeline

• Export produce quality → economic growth and employment

• Primary production → nutrition literacy → domestic food security

• Food criticism standards → restaurant culture → international reputation

We have excellence in silos. We have no food strategy.

And that’s why when Michelin arrives, everyone loses their minds. Critics aren’t really angry about $6 million. They’re angry about everything they wish existed but doesn’t: food security and nutrition access, food literacy, value over volume in production, local supply resilience, proper support for local food media, clear career pathways for young chefs, consistent quality standards, professional food discourse, someone - anyone - thinking about food holistically.

So they project all of it onto a Tourism New Zealand tourism marketing initiative.

Of course a $6.3 million tourism programme can’t deliver comprehensive food policy, media support, hospitality training, and social services.

It shouldn’t have to.

But the fact that everyone expects it to? That’s where the real gap lives.

Why Everyone’s Projecting Their Wish List Onto Michelin

Watch how the criticism splinters:

The Taxpayers Union sees it as wasteful spending during a cost-of-living crisis. What they’re really saying: “Why isn’t there better prioritisation of social spending?”

The Spinoff’s Nick Iles wants that money supporting Cuisine magazine instead. What he’s really saying: “Why isn’t there support for local food media?”

Chef Al Brown warns about toxic kitchen culture and suicide risk. What he’s really saying: “Why don’t we have better mental health support and professional standards in hospitality?”

Regional operators and commentators are furious only four cities are covered. What they’re really saying: “Why isn’t there comprehensive infrastructure and promotion for food tourism nationwide?”

Newstalk ZB’s John MacDonald compares it to Lifeline’s funding gap. What he’s really saying: “Why aren’t social services properly funded?”

All valid concerns. None of them are Tourism New Zealand’s job to fix.

But because there’s no one agency responsible for the big picture - no one connecting tourism to hospitality to food security to cultural infrastructure - everyone’s legitimate frustrations get funnelled into attacking whatever food-related initiative happens to make headlines.

Michelin just had the misfortune of being that initiative.

So Let’s Talk About That $6 Million

Now that we understand what’s really happening, let’s address the money.

Tourism New Zealand has one mandate: promote New Zealand as a destination to high-value international visitors. Not feed hungry people. Not fund crisis helplines. Not support domestic media. Promote tourism.

The $6.3 million comes partially from the International Visitor Levy - collected FROM tourists FOR tourism infrastructure - plus TNZ baseline funding. It literally cannot be redirected to Lifeline or food banks. That’s not how government funding works. And yes, TNZ had a mandate change during Covid, but now their job is to get the numbers back up (still 13% away) and they need to be the right tourists.

Comparing tourism spend to social services is like demanding the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra solve homelessness. Worthy cause, wrong agency, different budget line.

The question isn’t “should we spend this on restaurants instead of people?” It’s “is Tourism New Zealand effectively executing its actual mandate?”

On that measure? They nailed it.

The Scale Nobody’s Grasping

Let’s get some perspective on what New Zealand actually spends money on.

Since 2010, we’ve given nearly $1 billion in subsidies to international film productions. The scheme pays out around $200 million annually. Amazon’s Lord of the Rings series alone cost taxpayers $160 million for the first season - before relocating to the UK.

The Peter Jackson LOTR trilogy? We subsidised it $150 million. The return? An estimated $620 million in tourism revenue between 2001 and 2021.

In April 2025, Tourism New Zealand spent $13.5 million on an Australia campaign. Earlier, they dropped $500,000 on the “Everyone Must Go” slogan that got mocked mercilessly but apparently worked.

This Michelin investment represents less than 2% of Tourism New Zealand’s $130 million annual budget.

If we can spend $160 million helping Amazon film hobbits, we can spend $6 million helping our outstanding food experiences become top of the must-do list with elite food travellers.

The Australia Comparison That Makes Us Look Smart

“Australia declined Michelin, so we should have too!”

Let’s examine this brilliant logic (insert eyeroll).

Australia was quoted $40 million over five years. We’re paying $6.3 million over three. Australia has 26 million people. We have 5 million. Australia already has World’s 50 Best representation, established fine dining tourism infrastructure, and multiple domestic food guides with genuine international reach.

We are not Australia. Different scale, different food media landscape, different value proposition. Australia is over 15 years deep into a highly effective food and drink tourism strategy - hello South Australia, hello Melbourne? You know the reputation of those destinations and there’s a reason. Australia has already been spreading the food and drink word—New Zealand needs Michelin to help us get the job started. Because every critic of the Michelin package has already been outspoken that we don’t do enough to spread the good word.

If anything, we negotiated Michelin at a bargain price while Australia’s Tourism board looked at their quote and thought “probably not worth it at that cost.”

We got in cheaper. That’s not us being stupid. That’s strategic.

Understanding Tourism Math

“Only 36,000 extra visitors? That’s $175 per visitor!”

This reveals a spectacular misunderstanding of how tourism economics work - which, having spent years in tourism marketing strategy, I find both amusing and depressing.

Those 36,000 visitors don’t materialise at Auckland Airport and immediately vanish. They stay in hotels (multiple nights). They eat at restaurants (multiple meals). They drink wine (hopefully lots). They visit regions. They shop. They return. In fact, all of Tourism New Zealand’s other projects support stay longer and do more. So like compounding interest, no one comes this far to go to a single city. And you can’t help but travel through the regions as you get to our other must-do experiences. Stay longer: spend more.

Tourism New Zealand’s own research - including datasets I worked on - shows 87% of people actively considering New Zealand cite “trying local cuisine” as their number one interest.

Once visitors are here, they MUST spend on food and drink. That’s not optional tourist behaviour - that’s survival meeting destination experience.

More critically, Michelin creates what economists call a “quality signal.” It’s not just about the tiny percentage who specifically hunt Michelin stars. It’s about positioning New Zealand as a serious culinary destination in the minds of millions who’ll never eat at a starred restaurant but whose decision-making is influenced by that reputation.

Chef Peter Gordon, who’s run restaurants across London, Auckland, New York, Istanbul and Wellington, gets it: “If you end up in the guide, it’s going to guarantee tourism visitors will come to you that maybe wouldn’t have heard of you before.”

Michelin International Director Gwendal Poullennec noted that internationally, 82% of restaurants in the guide report increased profits - not from raising prices, but from increased customers who spend more on wine and return visits.

The ripple effect compounds. That’s not $175 per visitor. That’s $175 into an economic multiplier that flows through accommodation, transport, retail, regional tourism, and repeat visitation.

The Cuisine Conflict That Reveals the Gap

Yes, New Zealand has Cuisine magazine’s Good Food Guide. Editor Kelli Brett and her team work hard. The industry respects them. They awarded hats to over 100 restaurants this year.

The Spinoff’s Nick Iles suggested we should have spent “just a fraction of that $6m” working with Cuisine instead.

This perfectly illustrates the systems gap I’m talking about.

Cuisine is a privately owned commercial business. It’s responsible for making its own Good Food Guide commercially viable. The government doesn’t subsidise Metro magazine or the Herald’s restaurant reviews. Why would it subsidise Cuisine?

Because people think it should. Because there’s no clear understanding of what’s government’s job versus what’s commercial media’s job versus what’s industry’s job when it comes to food culture.

Tourism New Zealand’s mandate is international tourism promotion, not domestic media support. Cuisine can’t drive travellers from Shanghai or Chicago the way Michelin can. Its reach is primarily domestic - which is exactly what it should be.

Michelin’s 125-year global brand recognition is precisely what TNZ is buying. And it’s only available by partnering with Michelin, not by artificially inflating a local publication’s international profile with government cash.

Both can thrive. Both should thrive. But in different lanes, serving different purposes, funded by different models.

The confusion about this? That’s the gap talking.

The Real Opportunity Hidden in the Noise (And Why It Scares People)

Now we get to the genuinely exciting bit that everyone’s missing while they’re screaming about budget lines.

Michelin’s arrival forces New Zealand to confront something uncomfortable: our food criticism isn’t anonymous, isn’t formally trained to a unifying standard, and operates with zero degrees of separation.

Chef Al Brown’s concerns about Michelin’s “dark side” are valid. He told RNZ: “Chefs have taken their lives over Michelin Stars... if we’re living and dying by a star system, I don’t think that’s healthy at all.”

He’s absolutely right about the toxicity risk. But some of the fear and angst about Michelin isn’t just about pressure - it’s about the unknown. About a higher standard. About actual anonymity.

Because here’s what we actually have: Kerry Tyack, Kelli Brett, Lauraine Jacobs - some of the most recognisable faces in New Zealand dining rooms. Brilliant food writers, absolutely. But everyone knows exactly who they are the moment they walk through the door.

When Jesse Mulligan, the Herald’s influential dining-out editor, wrote a truly scathing review of The Grill, he later went back by invitation to assess what had changed. And scatching is a stretch, he was kind in trying to understand if it was meant to be that way! Good, thorough work. But zero degrees of separation. The restaurant knew he was coming. They knew who he was. They could prepare.

Michelin is the opposite. Anonymous inspectors with rigorous training, consistent methodology, and standards calibrated across 40 countries. Restaurants can’t prepare. Can’t butter up the critic. Can’t offer the special table or the off-menu tasting.

That’s terrifying if you’re used to the cosy intimacy of New Zealand’s small dining scene. But it’s also exactly what professional food criticism looks like. A constructive partnership between the critic and the kitchen.

The solution isn’t to claim “no one else can understand our food” because they’re uncomfortable. Too late, the assessors have already been here. It’s to level up our own discourse while Michelin does its job. To professionalise food writing. To develop formal training. To build genuine critical infrastructure.

That’s the opportunity. And it’s worth far more than $6.3 million.

Only Four Cities? That’s Actually Strategic

Regional exclusion complaints are predictable. Craggy Range in Hawke’s Bay - one of only six restaurants with three hats - isn’t eligible because it falls outside Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, and Queenstown.

Frustrating for them? Absolutely. Fatal to the programme? No.

Michelin is making a targeted bet on New Zealand’s primary tourist centres. If the inaugural guide succeeds, expansion becomes possible. If TNZ had tried to cover the whole country in year one, $6.3 million would be spread too thin to make meaningful impact anywhere.

Better to do four cities brilliantly than ten cities badly.

And let’s be pragmatic: regional restaurants have been building international reputations without Michelin for years. Craggy Range doesn’t need a star to be excellent. But four major cities landing decisively on the global culinary map? That raises the profile of every food and wine region in New Zealand.

A rising tide lifts all boats. Even the boats not directly in the harbour.

PS why is no one screaming about the lack of drinks representation in Michelin judging criteria?

The Silence That Speaks Volumes

You know what’s fascinating? The relative quiet from some of our most established food voices.

Jesse Mulligan has been (so far) notably silent on the Michelin announcement. Perhaps that’s wisdom - staying above the fray while everyone else loses their minds. And Kelli Brett has been collegial and supportive, acknowledging it’s validation of Cuisine’s domestic efforts. Or perhaps it’s because people closest to the actual work of food criticism understand how complex this conversation really is, how many competing interests are at play, and how little anyone seem capable of nuance right now.

Meanwhile, the loudest voices are often those furthest from the kitchen, the business case, and the actual work of building food culture.

That tells you everything.

What We Actually Need (And Won’t Get From Michelin)

Let me be crystal clear: Michelin won’t solve our problems.

Not every restaurant will get a star. Most won’t be reviewed. Some cities won’t be covered. Excellent chefs will be overlooked. The guide will make mistakes. It will probably misread New Zealand’s casual dining culture. It will take years to calibrate properly.

All true. None of it changes what matters.

What we actually need - what this entire hysterical debate proves we desperately need - is someone whose job it is to think about food holistically. To connect:

• How we grow food → how we eat food → how we export food

• How we train chefs → how we review restaurants → how we promote culinary tourism

• How we support food security → how we celebrate food culture → how we build food literacy

• How we develop hospitality careers → how we retain talent → how we professionalise the industry

That’s a food strategy. A proper one. With budget, mandate, and accountability.

We don’t have it. We’ve never had it. And we’re not getting it anytime soon while our loudest voices are distracted by the wrong debate.

So when Michelin arrives - a narrow, specific, tourism-focused initiative doing exactly what it’s designed to do - everyone projects their wish list onto it and screams when it can’t deliver everything from social services to domestic media support to mental health care.

The Real Scandal

As Restaurant Association chief executive Marisa Bidois said: “This is an incredible moment for our sector, and one that will inspire many operators to continue lifting the bar for hospitality in New Zealand.”

That’s it. That’s the entire point. Not perfection. Not salvation. Inspiration and aspiration within a very specific mandate.

If Michelin’s arrival forces a national conversation about how we value, discuss, and systematically support food culture - from paddock to plate to criticism to tourism - then $6.3 million will prove to be the bargain of the decade.

The critics are right that we have problems. They’re just wrong about which ones matter.

The real scandal isn’t that Tourism New Zealand spent $6 million on Michelin.

It’s that we’re a country of 5 million people with world-class produce, talented chefs, and passionate food lovers - and we still don’t have anyone whose job it is to connect all the dots.

That’s the gap Michelin exposed. And no amount of screaming about budget lines will fill it.

Here’s the question: When you dismiss a drink because it’s unfamiliar—too smoky, too strong, too foreign—are you exercising taste, or enforcing prejudice?

The liquid in your glass has never been just a drink. It’s a historical document, a power structure, a social contract written in alcohol and ritual. And if we’re honest about how beverages have shaped global history, we must confront an equally uncomfortable truth: what we refuse to drink reveals as much about power dynamics as what we’ve imposed on others.

As the International Wine Academy recently noted, “There is a danger of reducing wine to a mere health risk, thereby forgetting its cultural, social and human dimension.” This is the blind spot. Good drinks are the lubrication for human interaction, cultural transmission, and community identity. History is full of liquid commodities that altered destiny—and the drinks we now reject or embrace are telling us who will hold power in the 21st century.

Coffee: The Architecture of Dissent

Coffee didn’t just conquer the world; it funded it. Its journey from the highlands of Ethiopia is a lesson in the economics of cultural assimilation, but its lasting power lies in its ability to create dangerous social space.

The Kaveh Kanes of the mid-15th-century Ottoman Empire were the original disruptive technology. They were radical, accessible spaces where merchants and thinkers converged on equal footing—the original social network. Authorities repeatedly tried to ban coffee, not for the caffeine, but because these spaces were a low-cost engine for intellectual friction and dissent.

When coffee reached Europe in the 17th century, this power was amplified. London coffee houses became “penny universities”—and they weren’t just hosting the Enlightenment, they were monetising it. Lloyd’s of London started as a coffee house in 1686, where ship captains and merchants gathered to share intelligence and eventually underwrite maritime risk. Ideas and insurance policies were disseminated over the same cup, accelerating both the age of reason and the age of capitalism.

The communal ritual that coffee mandated—not just the bean’s economic value—created the modern world. Today, the Fair Trade movement isn’t just economic reform—it’s a cultural attempt to return agency to the soil and the grower, correcting colonial-era extraction one certified bag at a time.

Tea: Empire’s Thirst

Tea’s history is a relentless accounting of global power. Originating in ancient China, it was codified into the ritual of the Tang Dynasty—representing order and purity, the antithesis of the chaos it would soon unleash.

By the 18th century, British thirst for tea wasn’t just draining the coffers—it was a fiscal crisis. At its peak, tea accounted for 10% of British government revenue through import duties alone. The resulting trade imbalance with China was so severe that the British East India Company decided the best way to pay for tea was to get China hooked on opium. One imagines the board meeting was brief.

The Opium Wars of the mid-19th century were fought to maintain Britain’s tea supply. To break China’s monopoly permanently, the British introduced commercial tea cultivation to India after discovering wild plants in Assam. A single leaf, Camellia sinensis, became the primary driver of colonial violence, narcotic coercion, and agricultural imperialism.

Yet this dark history only underscores the human dimension: the British tradition of afternoon tea became a social institution defining class and civility, while in Japan, the Chanoyu evolved into a ritual embodying harmony and respect. The same plant was infused with radically different, yet equally profound, cultural meanings across the globe. If a drink becomes a national obsession, the cost of its acquisition will define foreign policy.

Sake: The Original Liquid Diplomacy

Before we discuss China’s baijiu, we need to acknowledge Japan’s centuries-long mastery of liquid diplomacy. Sake wasn’t just refined into a technical marvel; it was weaponised as social technology.

The ritualised exchange of sake cups—with its precise hierarchy of pouring, receiving, and toasting—has governed Japanese business and political negotiations since the feudal period. The o-choko (small ceramic cup) isn’t just a vessel; it’s a power map. Who pours for whom, who drinks first, who offers the refill—these aren’t social niceties, they’re non-verbal contracts that establish hierarchy and obligation.

When Western businesses entered Japan in the late 20th century, those who dismissed sake ritual as quaint ceremony lost deals to those who understood it as binding protocol.

Fortified Wine: The Original Liquid Capital

Before tea and coffee dominated global trade, European wines were already crossing oceans—but they had a spoilage problem. The solution, developed primarily in the late 17th century, was fortification: adding grape spirits to stabilise wine for long voyages.

Sherry, Port, and Madeira became the original liquid capital. By the time fortification became widespread practice, these wines had transformed from perishable cargo into durable commodities that could survive months at sea. Madeira, in particular, became essential to the Age of Exploration—the island was a standard provisioning stop for ships heading to the New World and East Indies, and local vintners discovered that adding neutral grape spirits prevented spoilage.

This durability made fortified wines valuable beyond mere refreshment. They provided a consistent, safe alternative to water aboard ships where fresh supplies spoiled quickly. Spanish and Portuguese colonial expansion was lubricated by these wines—they were provisions, trade goods, and cultural markers rolled into one cask.

Stability, in the form of fortification, became a commercial prerequisite for maritime trade. Wherever the European flag was planted, the wine glass followed, leading to the imposition of European culture and trade priorities. The message was clear: our drinks, our rules, our world.

The Marlborough Disruption

The role of a nation in the liquid economy isn’t always defined by imperial reach. Sometimes, it’s defined by a single, high-impact sensory disruption that arrives at precisely the right cultural moment.

New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc didn’t just find a niche; it detonated the entire category. But why did it work? Through the late 1970s and 1980s, French Sancerre had established itself as the benchmark for Sauvignon Blanc—elegant, mineral-driven, food-friendly wines that graced restaurant lists globally. The style was refined, restrained, sophisticated. All the adjectives that signal “you need to understand this to appreciate it.”

Then Marlborough Savvy B arrived. Rescued cuttings were planted by Montana in 1973 with the first commercial vintage in 1979 (followed by Cloudy Bay’s launch in 1985), introduced passionfruit, gooseberry, and cut grass so pronounced it felt like olfactory assault. This wasn’t subtle. This wasn’t polite. The intensity was the point. The global market, it turned out, was ready for something that didn’t require insider knowledge to enjoy—and New Zealand provided it with confidence.

This act of liquid branding demonstrated that a small country could, through distinct flavour and timing, dictate global drinking trends and reposition itself from a peripheral primary producer to a premium taste-maker. The exchange here wasn’t about colonial reach, but the power of sensory shock and cultural confidence. If a new region can deliver a product with an unmistakable, disruptive flavour at the moment the market craves disruption, it commands cultural attention, bypassing decades of tradition.

Mezcal: The Defiance of Scale

In contrast to the globalising sweep of wine, Mezcal is a spirit of radical grounding. It is the liquid signature of Mexico, inseparable from its micro-climates, its distinct agave species, and its ancient production rituals dating back hundreds of years.

Mezcal’s allure lies in its defiance of industrial scale. The slow-roasting of the agave heart in conical earth ovens is a liturgical act—a temporal commitment that rejects the efficiency metrics of globalized spirits. The smoke, the earth, the specific hands that harvest and distill—these aren’t marketing romance, they’re the irreducible conditions of the spirit’s existence.

The current global fascination has brought economic opportunity but also an existential threat: the rush for profit risks destroying its human and ecological foundations. The challenge is whether the spirit can survive its own cultural success without severing the thread that connects the drink, the distiller, and the community. When we fetishise mezcal in high-end cocktail bars, are we honouring its tradition or beginning the same extractive process that destroyed pulque?

Liquid Stigma: The Eradication of Local Culture

The rejection of a drink is often the rejection of a people. This pattern—the powerful rejecting the liquid of the marginalised—is a recurring feature of modern history.

In 20th-century Mexico, the cultural war against the ancient agave beverage pulque provides the starkest example. Despite being a nutritional and cultural staple for millennia, pulque was stigmatised. Industrial beer companies, often backed by foreign capital, launched campaigns that framed pulque as dirty, low-class, and dangerous.

The campaign worked with devastating efficiency. Consumption dropped by over 90% in the 20th century. This wasn’t market competition—it was near-eradication through weaponised marketing and political pressure. European-style lagers became modern and aspirational; pulque became backward and shameful. The message was explicit: to be modern, to be respectable, one must drink like Europeans.

This is how global economic interests weaponise taste to dismantle local identity. When a multinational corporation can make an entire population ashamed of their ancestral drink, we’re witnessing cultural violence disguised as consumer choice.

The Shifting Liquid Order: East vs. West

If history’s liquid companions defined the British Empire and the European Enlightenment, which libations are shaping the geopolitical landscape as the global centre of economic gravity shifts East?

The Western Response: Cocktails as Syntax

The cocktail is the West’s current liquid cultural expression, and it’s revealing. It’s not about a single commodity; it’s a syntax of spirits, a fluid recombination of global ingredients. The rise of the artisanal cocktail bar reflects the Western model of late-stage globalisation: taking parts from everywhere, creating a new branded narrative, and often fetishising the global sources it blends.

This is high-art social performance, but it’s also potentially symptomatic of cultural decline. When your liquid identity is defined by recombination rather than singular tradition, what does that suggest about cultural confidence? The cocktail is magnificent, but it’s also borrowed clothes—we’re making amaro in Brooklyn, vermouth in Hawkes Bay, single malt in Tasmania. It’s the Sauvignon vs. Sancerre playbook: adapt and sell. But unlike New Zealand’s disruption, we’re not creating new categories—we’re recreating old ones with ‘same-same but different’ marketing.

There’s nothing wrong with this, but let’s not pretend it’s the same as having a drink that’s been yours for centuries, inseparable from your soil and your identity. The cocktail is cosmopolitan fluid; it’s not rooted earth.

The Eastern Ascendancy: Baijiu and Soju

The real disruption is that the West is no longer setting the terms. For centuries, Asian spirits like China’s baijiu and Korea’s soju were dismissed as regional curiosities, despite being consumed in volumes that dwarf all other spirits combined. That dismissal is becoming costly.

As China assumes greater global economic power, baijiu has become the test foreign businesspeople cannot avoid. It is the medium through which serious business relationships are established in China. Business deals are routinely won or lost over a single toast. The ganbei toast system isn’t diplomatic theatre; it’s how hierarchy gets established, respect gets demonstrated, and trust (guanxi) gets built—not just between companies, but in the informal networks where real decisions happen.

Mistakes in protocol—such as holding one’s glass higher than the senior host during a toast—are not mere social faux pas; they’re breakdowns in the non-verbal contract, signifying a failure to grasp the power structure you’re attempting to navigate. Yet Western resistance to learning this protocol is palpable. Business executives who’ve spent years mastering the nuances of Bordeaux classifications or Scotch regional styles suddenly claim they ‘don’t drink strong spirits’ when baijiu appears. The intellectual curiosity they apply to their own national drink disappears, replaced by polite evasions and barely concealed distaste. Haven’t you seen it?

By now, the double standard should be clear. Watch what happens when baijiu appears at an international spirits competition. Judges who write 200-word tasting notes on the “terroir-driven salinity” of a single farm malt will dismiss baijiu as “challenging” or “an acquired taste”—code for “I don’t understand it, therefore it has no merit.” At industry events, Western buyers lean in with curiosity for the latest Scottish distillery using experimental cask finishes, but lean back when offered China’s national spirit. This isn’t discernment—it’s cultural gatekeeping disguised as palate refinement when we ought to be leaning into the lexicon.

This isn’t invited cultural exchange; it’s required cultural competence. And here’s the difference from historical Western liquid imperialism: China isn’t asking the world to drink baijiu out of fashion or taste—it’s requiring it as the price of doing business. The West imposed its drinks through colonial force; China through economic necessity.

Korea, meanwhile, is proving that cultural seduction works faster than economic coercion. Soju’s entry into Western markets didn’t require business dinners or trade agreements—it required Netflix. Fuelled by the global rise of K-Pop and K-Dramas, soju arrived not as a requirement but as an aspiration. North American imports of Korean alcoholic beverages, including soju, increased by 18% in 2023 alone—a growth rate that trade negotiations take years to achieve.

The mechanism is entirely different from baijiu’s path. Young Western consumers order soju bombs in bars not because they need to close a deal, but because Korean culture has become genuinely cool. The two-handed pour, the turned-away sip when drinking in front of elders—these rituals are learned voluntarily, even enthusiastically, by people who’ve never set foot in Korea. They’re absorbed through screens, adopted as part of a broader cultural package that includes K-beauty, K-fashion, and K-food. This is soft power at its most effective: the target audience doesn’t realise it’s being influenced because the influence feels like personal choice.

These represent two fundamentally different models of liquid power, and the West is losing on both fronts. China’s baijiu operates through economic leverage—learn the protocol or lose access to the world’s second-largest economy. Korea’s soju operates through cultural magnetism—young people choose it because Korean culture itself has become aspirational. The West can’t compete economically with China’s requirements, and it can’t manufacture the kind of organic cultural cool that makes an entire generation want to learn how to properly pour soju.

What both paths share is this: they’re no longer asking for Western approval. Baijiu doesn’t care if you find it challenging. Soju doesn’t need validation from spirits competitions. The drinks that once had to prove themselves worthy of Western attention are now dictating the terms of engagement. The question is whether the West will adapt with genuine curiosity, or continue to mistake its declining influence for discerning taste.

Embracing cultural intimacy

Beyond the macro-shifts of empire and geopolitics, the truest power of liquid is in its ability to enforce intimacy and identity. These aren’t just drinks; they’re gatekeepers.

In Scottish culture, the sharing of the whisky quaich—a shallow, two-handled drinking bowl—demands physical proximity and mutual trust, which is why it’s so often seen at weddings. You cannot drink from a quaich without bringing the other person into your intimate space. It’s a loyalty test disguised as hospitality.

In many Pacific Island cultures, kava—a non-alcoholic drink made from ground root—is the expression of community and hierarchy. The ceremony is elaborate, the flavor is challenging (muddy, numbing, vaguely medicinal), and the ritual is essential for lubricating discourse necessary to peace and governance. To refuse kava when offered is to refuse community itself.

Here’s where Western hypocrisy becomes visible: we romanticise the quaich and write poetic tasting notes about peat smoke, but we dismiss kava as “acquired taste” or baijiu as “too challenging.” We celebrate our own ritualised drinks as cultural sophistication while treating others’ as obstacles to overcome. The whisky enthusiast who can discourse on phenol parts-per-million in Laphroaig might physically recoils from kava’s muddy, numbing mouthfeel. The sommelier who champions “challenging” natural wines won’t give baijiu a second sip. The bartender who fetishises mezcal’s smoke dismisses soju as “too simple.”

The pattern is always the same: Western drinks are “complex” or “an acquired taste worth developing”; Eastern drinks are “too challenging” or “not for me.”

All drinking cultures enforce their rules. The question is: which enforcements do we celebrate as tradition, and which do we resist as imposition? The answer reveals who we believe deserves cultural authority.

Climate, Change, and the Death of Tradition

If climate change is redrawing the wine map—Champagne houses buying land in England, Bordeaux varieties migrating to Canada, traditional regions becoming unviable—then clinging to “Old World” traditions isn’t just culturally conservative, it’s environmentally irresponsible.

The liquid geography we inherited was never permanent; it was always shaped by climate, politics, and power. Burgundy’s dominance was partly terroir, partly the Catholic Church’s medieval land consolidation. The sacred wine regions we protect with appellations and UNESCO designations were often created by the same colonial and religious forces that destroyed other drinking cultures.

If we’re willing to accept that wine regions must adapt to survive climate change, why are we resistant to cultural adaptation? If we can celebrate Tasmanian Pinot Noir despite Tasmania having no historical claim to the variety, why do we balk at Mongolian arkhi (distilled fermented milk) or Ethiopian tej (honey wine)? The resistance isn’t about quality—it’s about whose traditions we’ve been taught to value.

The Question on the Table

The liquid on the table is never just a drink; it’s part of the cultural negotiation, dictating the human dimension of future power dynamics.

When we reject a drink’s origin story, its production, or its ritual, we’re making a political statement about whose culture deserves our attention. When we refuse to learn the baijiu toast because it feels like performative submission, but we master the Scotch whisky regions because that feels like connoisseurship, we’re revealing our prejudices.

The West spent centuries using its drinks as tools of cultural imperialism—imposing wine, spirits, and beer as markers of civilisation and modernity. We stigmatised and eradicated local drinking cultures from Mexico to the Pacific Islands. We used alcohol as both weapon and reward in colonial expansion.

Now the power dynamic is shifting. Eastern drinks are demanding recognition not as exotic curiosities, but as equals—or in some cases, as the new dominant paradigm. The question isn’t whether we enjoy baijiu or soju or tej. The question is: are we willing to extend the same cultural respect to unfamiliar drinks that we demand for our own?

Because if we remain resistant to unfamiliar methods—like arkhi, the earthy and laborious mezcal process, or the challenging flavour of kava—what does that suggest about our cultural flexibility? When we dismiss an entire category of drinks because they don’t conform to our palate, are we simply being discerning, or are we, in effect, drinking racist?

What we drink, and more importantly, how we approach unfamiliar drinks, remains the clearest indicator of who holds political power and who we’re willing to share a sacred moment with.

The glass in your hand is a mirror. What does yours reflect?

A Note to the Industry

We pride ourselves on curiosity, education, and expanding palates. We host masterclasses on terroir, cask influence, and botanical selection. We ask consumers to lean in, to learn, to appreciate complexity. We celebrate the journey from novice to connoisseur.

Yet when confronted with unfamiliar spirits from unfamiliar cultures, we often fail to take our own advice.

When I host a spirits tasting, I only ask that my guests learn enough to appreciate the liquid. I never demand they like it. Appreciation and enjoyment are different things—one requires openness and understanding, the other is simply preference. The industry could benefit from applying this same principle to ourselves.

If we’re going to claim global expertise, we need global curiosity. That means approaching baijiu with the same intellectual rigour we bring to bourbon. It means learning kava protocols with the same attention we give to Champagne service. It means recognising that “not for me” and “not worth understanding” are vastly different positions.

The drinks world is being redrawn. The question is whether we’re going to participate in that redrawing with genuine openness, or whether we’ll cling to the familiar and call it discernment. Because the rest of the world is watching, and our resistance is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish from prejudice.

Category education isn’t just for consumers—it’s for us. Greater understanding doesn’t require affection, but it does require effort. And if we’re not willing to make that effort for the spirits that are reshaping global drinking culture, we should at least be honest about why.

The trophy shelf at Juno Gin has just been recalibrated. Again. Not just with silverware, but with 2025’s two most coveted national awards—the ‘Best in Show’ titles at both the Super Liquor Super Spirits Awards in July and then the NZ Spirits Awards in August. For co-founder and distiller Jo James, it’s more than just a win; it is, in her words, “a huge piece of validation,” one that “felt like a long time coming.”

But what exactly is being validated? It isn’t merely a great recipe. It is the uncompromising, long-term commitment to a radical idea: that gin, like great wine, can be an expression of terroir—that the very soil, climate, and geography of Aotearoa should not just hold the bottle, but be in it.

Self-confessed geeks

The quest to prove this gin terroir is led by an unassuming pair of distillers: husband-and-wife team, Jo and Dave James. Having met in primary school in New Plymouth, their careers were forged in science and sustainability long before they launched Juno. Jo has a background in genetics and microbiology, with a Master of Public Health in Epidemiology. Dave studied food technology, engineering, and climate change.

Yes, they’re smart. Very smart, in fact. Around the dinner table, there’s no direction or curious avenue of conversation too complex or unapproachable. These are maker’s makers—philosophers, artisans, pragmatic and casually ambitious. Progressive explorers, appreciators of culture and collectors of knowledge, they bring this to their seasonal gin collection with the Blank Canvas competition. Artists can submit their work to be selected for the bottle print, an annual competition that has been running since 2019. If you can pin them down, the James’ are less salt of the earth and more Szechuan pepper and herbaceous seasoning. Fascinating to listen to and rewarding to spend time with.

They are, by their own admission, “sustainability geeks.” This intellectual curiosity and scientific rigour informs their core value: “Make it Right.” This means running a distillery that uses less than five litres of water per litre of spirit (the global average is over 26) and pioneering botanical supply chains. It’s this dedication to traceable, sustainable, and scientifically understood flavour that ultimately separates them and allows them to achieve ‘reproducibly good gin’.

The Audacity of Angelica and the Flavour Fixer

Jo’s philosophy begins with the base. She acknowledges the “appalling” view that vodka is merely a “failed gin,” but asserts that from a distiller’s perspective, a “fabulous base spirit” is the non-negotiable canvas for flavour.

A great base spirit is the quiet, unsung hero of the whole glorious chaos. It’s not shouting, ‘Look at me! I’m grain! I’m potato!’ No, a great base spirit is the cleanest, softest white linen you can imagine—the sort you only find in the deepest, darkest linen cupboard of a grand old house. It’s the silence before the music starts, that moment of perfect, neutral calm that allows the volatile oils of the botanicals—all those juniper sharps and citrus swirls—to dance their intricate little ballet right there on your palate, without any clumsy spirit character elbowing its way onto the stage. If it’s not flawless, the whole performance is a sham.

This rigour extends to the supporting botanicals. Take angelica root, an ingredient often a quiet anchor, which for James, proved the non-intuitive nature of terroir. She found that a high-altitude version of the root, initially “bitter and intense and not all that likeable“ when distilled alone, was actually the one they needed. Its intensity was essential to creating an “incredible balance” when working alongside the other botanicals—a perfect illustration that the worst solo artist often makes for the best bandmate.

“We’ve put all this focus into building relationships with horticulturalists to grow plant ingredients here in New Zealand to then understand terroir effects for each of those ingredients. And they do have terroir effects.”

Similarly, the Orris root, the key “flavour fixer” and aroma binder in quality gin, is central to the Juno method. Their Orris, grown in the Hawke’s Bay region, is the product of long-term planning—a process secured by signing an MOU and funding research with Massey University before they even had a still. This two-year commitment to development ensures a continuous, high-quality supply that they pay over $300 a kilo for. “If you’re not tasting your ingredients before you’re using them,” James asks, “what are you making?”

The reality of much wholesale botanical supply in New Zealand is large-batch importation with customs-required fumigation, storage in inconsistent humidity and stock management before it reaches a distillery. In the same way you must taste your spice for freshness before making a curry, you must know your botanicals.

“So before we even had a still, before we even had office furniture, we had nothing. And we were meeting with a grower and sitting on the carpet in an empty warehouse saying, hey, we’re going to make gin. Do you want to be part of that journey? And this is what it might look like for you. So we signed an MOU with them, and in that MOU, we bought the plants, and we agreed to fund the research work with Massey University, and we agreed to share the research results with our grower so they could then supply to other distilleries, both nationally and internationally.”

The $25,000 Tonne Question: The Great New Zealand Juniper Hunt

The most intellectually provocative element of Juno’s philosophy is their direct confrontation with what we might call the Juniper Crisis. The price of wild-harvested juniper, the essential heart of gin, has soared from $6,000 to over $25,000 a tonne since 2016. Compounded by geopolitical risk and a widespread fungus, this is both a massive economic burden and a sustainability flaw.

“So of course, juniper is a northern hemisphere plant. Doesn’t naturally occur in the southern hemisphere. It is always wild-harvested. There are no plantations of juniper. So you know, when we think about the fact that our distillery will be using up to a tonne of juniper a year. There’s more than 100 distilleries in New Zealand making gin...”

“If we’re looking at building significant export channels for New Zealand premium spirits...and if something is going to be a gin, it has to have juniper in it. And if we’re reliant on international travel to move Juniper around... that’s an economic risk.“

Juno’s response was to launch ‘The Great New Zealand Juniper Hunt’ with Massey University. The goal: to find the sparsely planted Juniperus communis trees scattered across the country, identify male and female plants (critical for producing the berry-like cones), and establish New Zealand’s first commercial plantations. It is, in essence, drawing a meaningful, long bow of economic foresight.

The Ozone Hole and the Flavour Advantage

The findings from Massey’s research projects offer a crucial validation for the vision of New Zealand-grown botanicals. Comparing the native cones with Macedonian and Chinese supplies, they found a distinct difference in the terpenes—the volatile oils that carry flavour and aroma.

New Zealand juniper is “surprisingly floral” and significantly higher in volatile oils and terpenes than imported stock. The scientists attribute this directly to the ozone hole and its downstream effects. Plant species in New Zealand have evolved to produce more volatile oils—a protective activity—in response to the heightened UV and irradiation effects.

This principle applies beyond juniper: “New Zealand coriander seed is really high in limonene,” Jo notes. For a distiller, this means the locally grown raw material is not only more secure and traceable but also possesses a unique, concentrated, and high-impact flavour profile that is fundamentally different and, arguably, better suited for the craft of spirit-making.

All this work with Massey University and Venture Taranaki to understand the terroir, growth opportunity and feasibility of New Zealand-grown botanicals doesn’t just benefit Juno Distillery. The true economic benefit and impact is far reaching, opening up channels for farmers, cultivators and procuring greater stability in future for exporters, not to mention benefits for other New Zealand distillers in future.

This cohesive working relationship between local business, academia and regional development is a testimony to the depth of skill and experience the James’ carry.

Sustained Validation: The True Cost of Quality

The validation of Juno’s two supreme awards is therefore more than just a pat on the back. It is a powerful affirmation that the pursuit of reproducible quality works—be it horticultural, economic or in manufacturing.

“We taste every batch, and we taste before we bottle. So after every batch, each and every day that we make it, we taste it.”

This commitment to flavour consistency and quality across the portfolio was further underlined by their latest medal haul, where they took home eight medals across the Juno and Vesta range. Their flagship Juno Extra Fine Gin and Vesta Vodka each secured Gold Medals—a direct nod to the integrity of both the botanical blend and the foundational base spirit.

Crucially, all four of their 2025 seasonal gins—Autumn, Winter, Spring, and Maia—were individually recognised with Silver or Bronze Medals. “To have each of our 2025 seasonal gins recognised, alongside our other spirits is amazing,” says Jo James.

The results prove that the intellectual framework—embracing the science, investing understanding terroir as a science not just a romantic notion, and demanding excellence from the base up—is not a stroke of luck. It is a philosophy that has made Juno an enduring force in New Zealand spirits. Demonstrating that the geeks can undeniably claim their top gongs in both popularity and reproducibly, very good, excellent gin.