SPITTING IMAGE

Keen to reduce their waste, the organisers of last year’s Rootstock wine festival in Sydney came up with the idea of distilling the contents of the popular event’s many spit buckets – hundreds of litres of expectorated chardonnay and pinot and amber wines and cloudy wines. The result, processed at nearby Poor Toms Gin, is a fine grappa (some bottled as is, some matured in cask) tentatively named Disco Pash – because, as distiller Griffin Blumer quipped, “it’s like a kiss from a stranger in a nightclub”. poortomsgin.com.au>