OUR AUSTRALIAN CHRISTMAS GIN
This very special gin is a tribute to four things our Co-founder, Cam loves: Australia, Christmas, gin and his late mum, Wilma.
Each year Wilma would use the 1968 Australian Women’s Weekly recipe to make her puds on Victoria Derby Day, while the rest of the family listened to the races. To this day, one of Cam’s great childhood memories is how his house would smell like Christmas over Cup weekend.
“I found the exact recipe when I was cleaning out some boxes a few years back, and thought it’d be fun to start doing it with my girls every year.
The first time ’round Viv was our chief measurer and in charge of the playlist (T Swift got a decent run). She was meticulous, down to the last currant.
Lizie was our stirrer (quite appropriate) and literally got her hands dirty – not sure she knows we have a sink because I was chipping dried pudding mix off various furniture for weeks afterwards.
And then we had Alice, because no Christmas pudding day is complete without a supervisor (or heckler), so she talked some good game and was enthusiastic in offering advice on something she knew nothing about.
And Leah and I cleaned up the mess! Our kitchen looked like Santa’s reindeer had eaten the mushrooms near the back shed…
But even as I was buying all the ingredients at the shops (mixed peel, oranges, dried fruit), I just kept thinking how well it would all distill. And with juniper having such a great pine needle character to begin with, it just started to make sense really quickly.”
So Cam distilled the Christmas puddings by putting them in the botanical basket of a still and distilling a base of juniper, cinnamon, star anise, coriander seed and angelica over the top of them.
The result smelt like gin and tasted like Christmas. With juniper-led Christmas tree notes and plum pudding character, it is perfect sipped over ice, mixed with ginger (ale or beer), or made into one of these delicious cocktails.
For our 2017 release, Cam added a touch of Muscat that had been sitting in barrels which previously aged Pedro Ximenez. So we got more depth, more complexity and an even more Christmas-y gin.
It is, without a doubt, our most lovingly crafted gin, from the multiple techniques and processes that have gone into making it taste extraordinary, to the original artwork commissioned for each label.
In 2016, we had ‘Warm and Christmas’ by Australian artist Jade Suine. In 2017, a vintage Christmas Beetle adorned the label by Darren Song. In 2018, it was all about summer with ‘Basking in the Sun’ by Melburnian Stephen Baker, and in 2019, Tim Summerton’s exquisite ‘Flame Trees’ adorned the bottle.
In 2020, we had Lucy Dyson’s rich collage art, celebrating coming together with loved ones. In 2021, we had Andrea Huelin’s iconic prawns and pavlova spread and for 2022, we had painter Jane Reynolds create a stunning abstract Christmas scene, with the presents arranged around the tree.
For our 2023 release, we decided to push the artistic boat out and commissioned the wonderful Jo White to create not one, but nine original artworks to capture her sense of the uniquely Australian Christmas experience. The resulting label featured all nine of her evocative pieces, each capturing a perfect slice of Christmas tradition.
In 2024, we asked Australian crochet artist, Trevor Smith to hand craft ten of his (and our) favourite Christmas table things. Each creation is whimsical, charming and beautifully detailed. We couldn’t fit them all on the bottle, so we chose a pudding, a pavlova, a ham and a few glasses of Christmas Gin Punch.
