8 original photos
We’re 90 miles into a 100-mile bike ride from Lake Ohau to Oamaru when our water bottles run dry. We pull off Georgetown-Pukeuri Road and into the driveway of a house that looks inhabited. It’s hot. I’m thankful for the stop — because in addition to being parched I’m also borderline delirious from the long ride. A middle-aged couple welcomes us and fills our bottles in the kitchen. My phone rings. It’s Greg Petry, Cellar Door Manager at the New Zealand Whisky Company. Petry, an American, kindly reminds me that we had an appointment a half hour ago and that they’re about to close up for the day. As luck would have it, though, he’s a cyclist, too, and he agrees to meet us whenever we arrive.
45 minutes later farmland turns to suburbs and then rather abruptly into the historic commercial district of Oamaru, known as the “Victorian Precinct,” a street lined with impressive buildings constructed of Oamaru stone (limestone) in the 19th century. Just past them, there’s a public garden, harbor and (a sign informs us) a colony of little blue penguins. We strip naked in a parking lot, jump in the ocean to clean up and walk to back to the storefront in the historic district to meet Greg and Grant Finn, Operations and Production Manager, who are hanging out front next to a pale yellow Fiat 128SL.
We’d made somewhat hasty arrangements to visit, a sort of Hail Mary pass if we happen to make it to Oamaru in time in the midst of a packed itinerary, but as they welcome us into their office and warehouse it becomes clear that we’ve stumbled on something special. The New Zealand Whisky Company is housed in an old grain storage building constructed in the late 19th century. At that time Oamaru was becoming an important service center for gold miners and pastoralists as well as a burgeoning port town, particularly for the frozen meat export industry. Development slowed, though, as Oamaru was hit hard by the depression of the 1880s, an expensive aqueduct project that nearly bankrupted the town and the closure of the harbor to shipping in 1974. This particular building, Petry points out, has barely been used since the 1920s.
“They kicked out the penguins on the first floor,” he says, guiding us up the stairs to the second floor, a massive wooden space with lofted ceilings and windows opening onto the Pacific Ocean. “They boarded it up and the penguins were sitting outside going, ‘What the hell, man?’ They put in a kitchen on the first floor. There was an art gallery on the third, and the whisky on the second floor. That’s where it has been living ever since.”
“A lot of times it comes off like a Rorschach test. People come in and smell it and say, ‘Okay, I know it’s whisky, but what am I smelling?’”
The story of the whisky here is actually a bit more complicated than swapping penguins for booze. The current owners, a group of investors, acquired a stock of whisky — 80,000 liters in 443 barrels, being stored in an old airplane hangar — in 2009. Those barrels were originally produced by the Willowbank Distillery in Dunedin, which opened in 1974 and was bought by Seagrams of Canada in the 1980s, sold to Fosters in 1997 and closed down shortly thereafter. What the investors had on their hands at that time included a combination of blended product as well as a highly regarded single malt called Lammerlaw, named for a mountain range outside of Dunedin. The raw, liquid material quickly gave this small New Zealand brand an outsized reputation.
