- Max Allen
- Life & Luxury
- Food & Wine
The Australian craft spirits picking up big overseas prizes
Curatif is hot on the heels of Four Pillars and other recently founded brands, scooping up its second consecutive “best in the world” award. How do they do it?
Thursday, October 19 was a big night for Matt Sanger. That evening, the founder of Melbourne-based canned cocktail company Curatif stepped up to the podium at the International Wine and Spirit Competition in London, and accepted the trophy for the best ready-to-drink alcohol (RTD) producer in the world – for the second year in a row.
Not bad for a business that only started operating in 2019, and was run for the first few months from Sanger’s mum’s living-room table.
Curatif cocktails, including the Mai Tai, at right, that impressed Glenmorangie. Kristoffer Paulsen
“It was pretty wild at the awards night,” says Sanger. “I met one of the head distillers at [major Scotch brand] Glenmorangie there. He said to me: ‘I tried your Mai Tai the other day. I thought it was great’. And I’m thinking, hold on: I grew up drinking your whisky with my dad. Glenmorangie was Dad’s favourite. So, yeah, to go from having what I thought was a pretty good idea for a business five years ago to now being recognised in that sort of environment. That’s pretty amazing.”
Curatif wasn’t the only Australian spirits company to be recognised at the international awards. Top Shelf International’s Grainshaker brand took out the vodka trophy – beating much larger, more established vodka makers. And Yarra Valley-based Four Pillars was named best gin distillery – for an unprecedented third time.
Matt Sanger, the founder of Melbourne-based canned cocktail company Curatif, with the trophy for best ready-to-drink alcohol producer in the world.
Australian winemakers are no strangers to this long-running competition: well-established producers such as Rosemount and Wolf Blass have been winning IWSC accolades for decades. As it happens, the Outstanding Wine Producer trophy this year went to an Australian – again – this time to Margaret River’s Larry Cherubino.
What arguably makes the Aussie distillers’ achievements more noteworthy, though, is the fact that, unlike our wine industry, our craft spirits scene is so new: Four Pillars, considered a “veteran” player, started making gin as recently as 2013; Grainshaker has only been around since 2020, launching not long after Curatif.
Four Pillars head distiller Cameron Mackenzie. The company was named best gin distillery for the third time.
It’s not just the IWSC where Australian distillers excel, either. Every week, it seems, I hear about yet another trophy or gold medal won by an Australian whisky maker or gin producer at a competition somewhere around the world, from San Francisco to Hong Kong.
But the IWSC seems to carry the most kudos. It’s not only one of the oldest (it was founded in 1969) but one of the largest (with more than 12,000 entries this year from hundreds of producers). And it resonates with regular drinkers.
“It’s like the Oscars of the spirits world,” says Sanger. “Internationally there are alco-bev industry accolades that perhaps mean more within the industry. But the average person on the street has never heard of them. IWSC has a profile with consumers, partly because so many Aussie brands like Four Pillars have been crowing about their success. So it matters.”
Grainshaker’s Seb Reaburn: “It’s pretty damn exciting,” he says of the award for best vodka.
Grainshaker master distiller Seb Reaburn describes a trophy at the IWSC competition as more like winning the Olympics: so many entries from around the world, judged by some of the best palates on the planet.
“I’m blown away for a vodka I created to be recognised globally,” says Reaburn. “It’s pretty damn exciting. I came to distilling from cocktail bartending, and for me it’s all about the taste experience.”
This, says Matt Sanger, is the key to Curatif’s success, too.
“The cocktail always comes first,” he says. “It’s madness to do things the way we do at the scale we do it. To brew our own coffee for our Espresso Martini, to use fresh lime juice for our Tommy’s Margarita. But we want to deliver a drink in a can that tastes like it’s just been made by someone behind a bar.”
It’s an approach that is clearly paying off.
Award-winning spirits
Whether you’re looking for core ingredients to make your own cocktails at your next party, a way to serve lots of cocktails all at once to a thirsty crowd, or something a little more fancy to sip at your next dinner party, these three distilleries have you covered.
Curatif cocktails
I tried 10 of the cocktails in Curatif’s core range with Matt Sanger, plus a couple of limited-release and one-off specials created for “club” members (a subscription service that delivers more experimental drinks every month). All were good (even if some, like the super-sweet Plantation Rum Hurricane and the super-chilli-hot Spicy Margarita, were not to my taste), but my picks were the Tequila Tromba Tommy’s Margarita (tastes like it was made to order by a good bartender – a huge achievement), the classically bittersweet citrus-tinged Never Never Distilling Co Negroni, and, to my great surprise, the Archie Rose Espresso Martini.
This is not a drink I ever order in a bar (because the ones I’ve tried have often been pretty awful), but Curatif’s version is excellent: the coffee is brewed in-house from single-origin Brazilian beans, the vodka is from Archie Rose, the flavour is rich and dark and caramelly, the texture is creamy smooth. No wonder it has won so many awards.
Curatif’s Archie Rose Espresso Martini cocktail: a favourite of the writer’s. Kristoffer Paulsen
All the Curatif cocktails are the same price, regardless of strength or the main spirit used: four 130ml cans cost $45 curatif.com
Four Pillars gin
For the festive season, you might want to splash out on one of the limited-edition bottlings from this multi-award-winning distillery. The latest iteration of the perennial favourite, Four Pillars Christmas Gin ($100), for example, is redolent of golden raisins and festive spices and a long, lovely sweet lick of juniper.
Four Pillars’ Australian Christmas Gin: an ideal tipple or gift this festive season.
Another option is the extraordinary Barrel Aged Underhill Shiraz Gin ($175). Shiraz grapes from Yarra Yering’s Underhill vineyard are steeped in Four Pillars gin that has been matured in the winery’s barrels. The resulting deep-purple tincture is put back into the same red-wine barrels for a further nine months’ maturation. It’s more like a brooding, strong, winey amaro than a gin: the kind of deeply vinous, bitter digestive that you could linger over after an indulgent meal. fourpillarsgin.com
Four Pillars’ Barrel Aged Bloody Underhill Shiraz Gin. Benito Martin
Grainshaker vodka
Grainshaker made a splash for a number of reasons when the brand was launched in 2020. For a start, the vodka was sold in wine bottles, with garish green screw-cap lids, and it came in three varietal styles, each highlighting the type of grain used in distillation: corn, wheat or rye. Everything about the brand, from the packaging to the messaging, seemed to be a departure from all the tired old tropes that characterise the vodka category.
Grainshaker, founded in 2020, sells its vodka in wine bottles. Kristoffer Paulsen
Of the three expressions, my pick is Grainshaker Australian Wheat Vodka ($50): for my palate it has the best balance of purity, softness of texture and hints of grain and subtle characters. The kind of really clean spirit I’d want in a vodka lime and soda over ice on a hot day. grainshaker.com.au
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