A name from recent memory.
We distil in the Old Gumeracha Cold Stores — a 1920s shed that once kept the district's apples cold. Our name honours that recent, working heritage: the applewood these hills grew.
It is only the newest layer of this place's story. These hills held meaning for tens of thousands of years before there was ever an orchard — and we try to make spirits worthy of both histories.
Two winemakers who got dirt crazy and bought a still.
Brendan and Laura Carter are trained winemakers. The still arrived at the end of 2011; distilling started in 2012; the first Applewood Gin took another three years of trial-after-trial to be worth releasing. Chasing site expression in wine led them, sideways, into the wonders of endemic produce most of us walk straight past.
B Corp–Certified Distillery
Good spirits, forever.
We certified as a B Corporation in August 2019 — the first distillery in Australia to do it. It took about twelve months, and it is deliberately hard.
It doesn't make us the most sustainable distillery — not by a country mile. It achieves something we think matters more: it makes us the most transparent. Third-party verified, quantified, published every year. Transparency is the ultimate anti-greenwashing.
We acknowledge and pay respects to the Peramangk people, the traditional owners of the land on which we distil; to the Adnyamathanha, Kaurna, Kokatha, Ngadjuri and Ngarrindjeri peoples, on whose lands we have been welcomed and whose Country grows botanicals we work with; and to all First Nations elders, past and present. Sovereignty was never ceded. This always was, and always will be, Aboriginal land.