Why we made a savoury gin, and put sun-dried tomatoes in it
Only three gold medals were awarded for contemporary gin at the 2026 New Zealand Spirits Awards. Our Mediterranean Gin has one of them.
Walk along the gin shelf at any decent bottle store and count what you see. Pink gins. Citrus gins. Gins with enough sugar in them to pass for a liqueur if you weren't paying attention. There's nothing wrong with any of that, and plenty of people are drinking it happily.
But if you're the sort of person who makes a martini at home, that shelf isn't really built for you.
A martini is a brutal test for a gin. There's nowhere to hide. No tonic, no fruit, no sugar, just gin, a whisper of vermouth and something salty on the side. A gin that tastes lovely with tonic and a wedge of grapefruit can fall apart completely in a coupe.
We'd wanted to make a savoury gin for a while, and doing the version of a thing nobody else is bothering with has been how we've worked from the beginning. So the brief started with the drink, not the botanicals: savoury, and good enough to make a martini you'd rather drink at home than order out.
A one-line brief and nothing else
This is the first gin our distiller Cory has developed from scratch, start to finish. Sarah gave him the brief (savoury, martini-ready) and then left him to it. What made this interesting is that Cory trained as a chef in Wellington before moving back to Golden Bay. When he sat down to build the recipe, he didn't reach for the gin textbook. He went back to the kitchen.
Rosemary, sage and thyme, then the odd ones
Cory started with the trio of herbs he was taught to use at cooking school: rosemary, sage and thyme. Then came the two botanicals that make people raise an eyebrow: sun-dried tomatoes and rock salt. On paper they sound like a stunt. In the glass they're the reason the whole thing works. The tomato brings a deep, slow savouriness that herbs alone can't reach, and the salt does what salt always does, which is make everything else taste more like itself.
Underneath all of that sits our usual base, juniper front and centre, with liquorice root and coriander for spine, and Golden Bay spring water. It's bottled at 44%, which the martini brief demanded. Any lower and the botanicals go soft when the ice hits them.
The part that took the longest
Like all our new products, it took plenty of iterations to get right. Distilling isn't a business where the first version is the one you bottle. The difficulty with a savoury gin is that the line between "savoury" and "this tastes like soup" is thinner than you'd hope. What we can say is that from the first few distillations, we knew we were onto something. Not every project gives you that. Some you push uphill for months and quietly shelve. This one had it early, and the work after that was refinement rather than rescue.
Glad rags in Auckland
We launched it in June 2026, and the reception has been better than we expected for a gin that asks a bit more of the drinker than a pink one does. Then we entered it into the New Zealand Spirits Awards. Gin is far and away the biggest category in the competition, and contemporary gin is where most of the new and unusual stuff lands, so it's a crowded field to stand out in. We came away with one of only three Gold medals awarded in the whole category!
In August, Cory and Sarah flew up to Auckland for the awards dinner, got into their glad rags and celebrated with the rest of New Zealand's distilling industry.
One last thing
We don't tell these stories to make the gin sound clever. We tell them because the decision behind a bottle is usually more interesting than the bottle, and because we'd rather you knew what you were buying and why it exists.
Serve it cold. Very cold. A dirty martini with a good olive brine is where it's happiest, though a G&T with a sprig of rosemary is no hardship either. If you're a Bloody Mary person, it makes a Red Snapper that will ruin the vodka version for you.
