A Little Innovation Goes a Long Way

Well, this is rather exciting.

Last night, we swapped our farm clothes for something a little tidier and headed to Christchurch for the inaugural New Zealand Arable Awards.

And we're coming home with the Innovation Award!

It's a pretty special feeling to be recognised by the very industry we've spent our lives working in.

We've always been farmers first.

Grain has been grown on this land since 1883, long before whisky was ever part of the conversation. For generations, the job was to grow the best crop we could, harvest it and send it off the farm.

But somewhere along the way, we started wondering what would happen if we kept some of that grain and did something different with it.

What if we could take the barley, oats and wheat we grow and turn them into something that told the story of the farm they came from?

That question eventually led us down the rather enormous rabbit hole of building our own distillery.

And here we are.

We're still growing the grain, still watching the weather, still worrying about harvest and still doing all the things farmers do.

Only now, some of that grain travels a little further than the silo.

It goes through our distillery, into barrels and, eventually, into bottles.

Our whisky is still quietly maturing, but our gins are already giving people a taste of what can happen when we take familiar Southland crops and look at them a little differently.

That's what makes this award so meaningful to us.

It isn't simply recognition for making spirits. It's recognition for finding another way to add value to what we grow.

And to receive that recognition alongside some of New Zealand's best grain growers makes it even more special.

We're incredibly proud to bring this award home to Scotts Gap.

There are still plenty of ideas to explore, plenty of challenges ahead and an awful lot of whisky that needs time to do its thing.

But for today, we're going to enjoy this one.

From our farm to the glass. Who would have thought?

Rob & Toni