Crafting a category
We meet the trio who built one of Australia’s most prosperous gin brands – and blazed a trail for others
A communications professional and a former Olympian walk into a bar… This may sound like the beginning of a bad joke, but it is actually the origin story of one of Australia’s first, and now one of its foremost, craft gin brands: Four Pillars Gin.
Stuart Gregor and Cameron Mackenzie met while working in the wine industry around 20 years ago. Cam was working at the Yarra Ridge winery while training for the Sydney Olympics, having competed as part of a relay team at the 1996 Atlanta games, when he joined Stu at the head office of that business, Mildara Blass (now Treasury Wine Estates), in Melbourne in 1998.
Fast forward to 2013, and Stu and Cam were contemplating a move out of wine and into the burgeoning Australian gin scene. They felt their backgrounds lent them well to the shift – as Cam notes, gin is “the white spirit of choice” for many wine drinkers due to similarities in how it is appreciated, with a focus on aroma, flavour, texture and balance.
Rather than taking the London Dry route, they were more drawn to the contemporarystyle gins being made by craft distillers in the US and felt there was potential in a contemporary, boldly flavoured, truly Aussie style of gin. They toured Oregon and California, learning as much as they could from the states’ craft distillers.
This leads us to Four Pillars Rare Dry Gin, the flagship of the range and still Cam’s favourite. With Tasmanian pepperberry, Queensland lemon myrtle and Yarra Valley lavender in the botanical mix, Rare Dry is unapologetically modern and Australian – although it is very different in character to Four Pillars’ Modern Australian Gin, featuring Chinese Szechuan pepper and Australian macadamia nuts, grapefruit and apples.
Rare Dry was an instant hit, with the first batch of 480 bottles selling out in just two days. It was and still is beloved by both gin drinkers and professionals on the Australian bar scene, for whom it has provided a local staple in their cocktail toolkit.
As master distiller, Cam has helped Four Pillars to create some of the most innovative gins in the modern market which shout boldly about their origins. He creates recipes slowly and methodically, honing in on desired flavour profiles and combinations.
Four Pillars Bloody Shiraz Gin is a testament to the effectiveness of this process. The cult classic sees its Rare Dry Gin steeped with Yarra Valley Shiraz grapes, which Cam says have a softer profile than many Australian wine grapes and allow the gin to sing. Due to Bloody Shiraz’s resounding success (sales are growing at 67 per cent year-on-year), Four
Pillars now crushes more grapes than any winery in the Yarra region. It also spawned a trend, with around six other Australian distillers now also making a Shiraz gin.
Its most recent innovation, Olive Leaf Gin, was five years in the making and is another example of the value of experimentation. Four Pillars partnered with Cobram Estate, a young and ambitious olive oil producer based in Victoria, and used its oil and olive leaf tea as botanicals. The resulting gin – savoury, herbaceous, and texturally exciting – has been hailed as a triumph of spirits innovation.
Four Pillars’ next big project is architectural. It is in the midst of a AUS$6 million expansion at its distillery and brand home in Healesville, near Melbourne. This project will increase the size of both its hospitality and production capacities by around 200 per cent, and – the team hopes – put Four Pillars on the map as one of the world’s leading gin destinations.
A new cocktail bar and hospitality space will be able to accommodate around 250 people and its current bar area will be repurposed for tastings and sensory distillery experiences. Meanwhile, its production capacity will increase from around 65,000 nine-litre cases annually to 200,000 cases.
Four Pillars is now part of a thriving gin scene in Australia; of the 300-plus distilleries in the country, the majority are making gin. But Cam, Stu and their business partner Matt Jones have always had greater ambitions. “Once we got momentum we always felt we could create a global gin destination,” Cam explains. “Fortune favours the brave, and we have never been afraid to invest in the business.”
Their ambitions for global recognition are already being borne out. Four Pillars has been voted International Gin Producer of the Year by the International Wine and Spirit Competition two years running, and its respected position can be seen in the producers it has collaborated with: Santamanía in Spain, Hernö in Sweden, Japan’s Kyoto Distillery, and most recently, Stranger & Sons in India.
For the team, it is not only their own profile they are raising, but also that of Australian gin in general. Cam says, “I think Australia is making some of the most interesting gins in the world and we have got so much at our disposal… I firmly believe that nowhere tastes like Australia.”