Behind the Barrel: Crafting Our Christmas Gin 2025
When November rolls around each year and we start getting ready for the Christmas holidays,
When I started thinking about making this year's Christmas Gin back in November, I couldn’t help but reflect on the huge year we’ve had in 2025.
We built a beautiful roofed deck opening on to a panorama of the great western plains in front of the distillery, on which we hosted my oldest friend Darcy and Anastasia’s beautiful wedding at the farm in January, followed by our first ever public events at the distillery as part of Melbourne Food and Wine Festival, which saw over 200 people over two weekends in March see and experience our progress towards a cellar door for the first time. We harvested our first barley crop at the distillery, forming the base of our paddock to bottle spirits. We hosted many tastings at the Sun Theatre throughout the year, and built on our relationships with our wholesale customers. One of them, Navi Restaurant in Seddon, even gave us the opportunity to craft our first bespoke house gin for them!
So much work has been done this year on the distillery and cellar door. We upgraded our still to double our previous still’s size for higher throughput, cleaner and more delicious spirits. We also made this whole area significantly safer installing fire breaks, vapour barriers and so much more behind the scenes work.
It’s been a huge year for us and the last thing we do each year to cap it off is distill our Christmas Gin.
Combining our usual gin botanicals with a festive spice combination of cinnamon, nutmeg and clove, and distilling with classic fruit cake ingredients like citrus peels and sultanas, gives us a clear, punchy and aromatic distillate. On it’s own this gin is fantastic, but to give it just that little extra bump of vibrancy and flavour, we mature in for two weeks.
For this we go to our historical neighbours, Shadowfax Winery, and relieve them of one of their finest ex-Shiraz oak barrels. When we mature our Christmas Gin in this barrel, the shiraz-stained oak seeps a rich-red colour into the gin as well as blackberry and plum flavours. The oak too has the effect of giving a subtle vanilla flavour and reinforcing the cinnamon, nutmeg and clove botanicals.
Hand-bottled and labelled with our festive Christmas Gin label, its ready for all your Christmas orders!
We love serving this one like other matured spirits, served by itself on the rocks, where the cool water opens up the palate to the fruit and spices. We also like to mix it with some craft ginger ale/beers from the likes of Strangelove, Sodasmith and Fever-Tree, with a slice of lime to garnish.