So, About Herding Cats

Ask most distillers where their spirit came from, and you will get a story about a dream. Ours begins with a very bad year and a large volume of wine nobody could drink.

The name came later, and it is the best part, so we will save it for the end.

It started with a very bad year

After the 2020 bushfires, Tamburlaine had a large volume of smoke-tainted wine. It was not something anyone was going to pour a glass of, and that leaves you with a lot of unusable product on your hands.

The straightforward option is to write it off.

Tim Hamilton, our Director and Chief Distiller, felt certain he could produce a palatable neutral spirit from it instead, and avoid dealing with unusable product altogether. He was right, and that spirit became the beginning of Herding Cats.

A boy, his father, and a still

Tim did not arrive at that by accident. He has been fascinated by the concept of distilling since he was a very young man, when his father showed him the magic of it.

Years later he and his son Will toured a distillery in Edinburgh and distilled their own gin. That was the end of any pretence that this was a passing interest.

Having demonstrated he could make a quality neutral spirit, the next challenge was to create several distinct gin styles. That took exhaustive experimentation with a wide variety of botanicals to find the right combination of flavours.

Why ours tastes the way it does

Here is something most gin drinkers never think about. To make gin you need three things: neutral spirit, botanicals and a pot still. The botanicals get all the attention, but the spirit underneath them does a great deal of the work.

The vast majority of Australian gin producers do not make their own neutral spirit. They buy it from the two largest spirit producers: Tarac in South Australia, who make spirit from marc (the skins and seeds left over once the grapes have been pressed), and Manildra in New South Wales, a large flour miller who makes spirit from wheat. A few use sugar cane spirit, or whey, the sugar-containing by-product left over from cheese making.

Ours is grape-to-bottle. As far as Tim can ascertain, there are fewer than five true grape-to-bottle gin producers in the country.

It also means we have no need to hide behind strength. A higher ABV masks the botanical profile and leaves a gin feeling hot or spirit-y on the palate, while the more common 37.5 to 40% dilutes the flavour. Once distilled, our spirit comes off the still at around 70 to 73% and is cut back with pure water to the point where the botanicals and the base can both be tasted.

And the name?

With the liquid sorted, the range needed a name. Mark asked the team to come up with something unique.

The name came about when Mark asked the team to suggest a unique name for our gin. Lou reminded him of what he likens running a business to, and Lou’s dad likened it to trying to leave the house with 5 daughters.....

“It’s like HERDING CATS!”

The name stuck, which tells you something about how accurate it was.

Meet the range

Five bottles, all small batch, all hand-bottled, and no two of them pulling in the same direction. Fitting, really.

The gins have also done rather well for themselves at the London Spirits Competition and the Australian Gin Awards, which is not bad for a range that began as a way to rescue a ruined vintage.

Where to start

If you like a classic gin and tonic, start with Double Dutch. If you want something more unusual on the table, That's Amore with green olives will get people talking. And if you are a vodka drinker who has never thought much about where vodka comes from, Beachcomber is a good argument for starting to.