The Winery Eventide of Waiheke Island of North Island

The Scapegrace team claims it will be New Zealand’s largest ever distillery when it is fully completed in October 2023. It will eventually produce all of Scapegrace’s award-winning gins and vodkas, along with its soon-to-be-released single malt whisky. The company plans to expand into other spirits categories further down the line too. Managing director Daniel McLaughlin said that the climate and water quality in Central Otago – which is famed for its Pinot Noir – make the region ideal for produ ...

The Sotheby’s New York sale of Bourbon and Rye Whiskey, held at the weekend, combined two significant collections of American whiskey, with almost 100% of lots sold and 75% of them selling for above their pre-sale high estimates. The top spot for the most expensive lot in the auction went to a bottle of LeNell’s Red Hook Rye 24 Year Old Barrell #4, which sold for $43,750, double its pre-sale high estimate and making it the joint most valuable bottle of rye whiskey ever sold at auction. The sum w ...

Layers of colour in the sky before me: indigo, peach, salmon. In the rear-view mirror, the gold was catching fire. As I drove down through the lonely, Mistral-chilled vines of Babeau-Bouldoux towards nearby St-Chinian, I was thinking about what Christine Deleuze of Clos Bagatelle had just said. ‘When you came to visit 10 years ago,’ she reminded me, ‘you said we needed to wait another decade for a market breakthrough. Today you’ve said we need to wait another decade or two. So when, exactly, wil ...