By Brad Japhe

NESTLED humbly among the sprawling serrated earth of New Zealand’s Crown Range, an hour’s drive north of Queenstown, a cozy stone-walled distillery quietly pumps columns of steam toward the sky. Speckled white dots of sheep grazing on hills along the horizon are the only other obvious signs of life. It would be easy to confuse the scene with something straight out of the Scottish Highlands — especially with the smell of freshly fermented cereal grain piercing the crisp mountain air.

But then a whirring hum enters the sharp valley, intensifying for several seconds as a helicopter reveals itself over the ridge line. This is a markedly South Island sort of noise pollution, which dissipates back to quietude as it delivers its cargo of four well-heeled whiskey seekers to the rose garden of Cardrona Distillery. They’ve come like I have on this Tuesday in February, to sample the barrel-aged bounty of a modern New Zealand whiskey renaissance that promises to reverberate across the globe into the new year.

The distillery’s founder, Desiree Reid, is playing an outsize role in the effort to establish New Zealand among the ranks of Japan, Taiwan, Australia, and India with top-shelf new-world whiskey exports. She began laying down liquid at Cardrona in November 2015 — then a fairly audacious act considering the failed attempts of those that set sail before. Hers would be the first whiskey to roll off a South Island still since the Willowbank Distillery in Dunedin unceremoniously shuttered in 1997 from lack of interest, a mere 28 years after initially roaring to life.

Today she is joined by about two dozen colleagues, most of them considered micro-distilleries by international standards. The output of Cardrona — one of the bigger whiskey makers in the South Island — totals about 250,000 liters per year, compared with 21 million for Glenlivet Scotch.

And though almost all these nascent producers are specializing in single malt, there’s not yet a singular stylistic thread connecting them. “We’re too young as an industry to do that to ourselves. I think that would be damaging,” says Sarah Elsom, head distiller at Cardrona. “It’s really important that we work together to build a reputation of quality, first and foremost, so that we’re taken seriously on a global level. There are nuances to every distillery that we should explore before we put ourselves in a position where we say, ‘New Zealand whiskey has to taste a certain way.’”

A country comprising such a broad range of terrain stuffed into a relatively small landmass indeed lends itself to a vast array of whiskey profiles. Couple this diversity with the adventurous nature of the common Kiwi, and you’ve got a category that’s ripe for experimentation.

“Over the past decade, whiskeys here have been shaped by the microclimates in which they are founded and the people who have founded those distilleries,” says Ms. Reid, who deliberately set her operation in a place with profound seasonal variation. “For us, our extreme landscape forces interplay between the spirit and the oak. Sitting at 2,000 feet above sea level, our maturing stock is exposed to nearly a 100° [Fahrenheit] swing in temperature from summer to winter.”

For instance, a dram of the five-year-old Growing Wings ($134), a sturdy 63.9% alcohol by volume (ABV) cask strength offering, coats the tongue with a candied pecan richness you wouldn’t typically expect from a similarly aged whiskey matured in ex-bourbon or ex-sherry casks. There’s also a dank, umami note setting apart its aromatics, perhaps owing to the malt, which Cardrona now sources entirely from a neighboring region of the South Island. The inspiration may be Scotch, but the provenance clearly shines through.

Up on the more populous North Island, where the lion’s share of the country’s 26 producers exist in more temperate, or even subtropical, weather, Thomson Whisky takes its sense of place a step further with a Manuka Smoke single malt (NZ$135, roughly $81). The 92-proof spirit is built with barley that’s been malted using the nation’s most famous flowering plant, which provides bees with the raw material to make the world’s most expensive honey. It results in an unctuous liquid, offering cigar and cedar in the nose, while maintaining a honey and clove lightness in color and tone. An Islay-inspired peat monster this is not.

An hour south, just on the other side of Auckland, the seven-year-old Pokeno distillery has been building a following with its own experimental approach to malt-making. Its Exploration Series No. 1 Totara cask ($150) is the first whiskey to be matured in the eponymous wood indigenous to New Zealand’s lowland forests. It exudes a tropical bouquet and deploys a slightly astringent stone fruit essence across the mid-palate. The brand was the only New Zealand distillery to take home coveted Double Gold prizes (for No. 2 Winter Malt and No. 3 Triple Distilled in the series) at this year’s San Francisco World Spirits Competition.

Taking a page from Australian producers, Kiwi whiskey startups are naturally also seeking synergy with the country’s already established wine market. Scapegrace, which recently opened a NZ$25-million distillery and visitors center with help from the government in a different mountain valley near Cardrona, has earned critical acclaim for its Ephemeral (NZ$199), a five-year-old expression finished in a former pinot noir barrel from the lauded local vintage.

“Based on the location of our distillery in Central Otago, there is an abundance of wineries recognized on the global stage,” says Mark Neal, director of marketing for Scapegrace. “We have really embraced this opportunity and have started to play around with ex-pinot noir casks, understanding the influence of our new make over time.”

The Ephemeral cask-strength release unfurls fresh clusters of berry fruit atop a waxy texture, balancing out the oaky tannins of its spicy nose. Only several hundred bottles’ worth of the limited release ever made it beyond New Zealand borders.

Cardrona, on the other hand, didn’t even have enough of its own Otago Pinot Cask to officially go international — a real loss for global connoisseurs considering that this sophisticated spirit, brimming with stewed plum and milled pepper, was the result of a collaboration with Felton Road, one of the country’s top-rated wineries. (Although you can find it for over $400 on the secondary market.)

Given there’s no singular style of production or maturation or associated ingredients that can claim authority over the rest, what exactly is New Zealand whiskey?

Distilled Spirits Aotearoa, the trade association representing New Zealand’s whiskey producers, put forth a set of self-imposed labeling guidelines in early 2021 that largely mimic those in Scotland and Ireland, with one key difference: that spirit may age for a minimum of only two years as opposed to three for its old-world counterparts. Beyond that, New Zealand whiskey makers are quick to maintain their freedom to experiment. Or, perhaps more accurately, they’re reluctant to pigeonhole themselves to any singular approach.

“Native manuka wood smoke maltings and pinot noir cask maturations are obvious examples” of an attempt at crafting a local identity, says Siona Collier, managing director of Whisky Galore in Christchurch, one of the country’s largest whiskey shops. “But the New Zealand whiskey industry is very much in the embryonic stages, and with this in mind, you will understand that the parameters of style are very wide.”

New Zealand whiskeys can instead be loosely defined in a manner similar to those who craft them — and those who fly by helicopter through mountain ranges to sip them — namely, adventurous spirits.

“Innovation and creativity are at the forefront of what most of the distilleries are doing down here,” Ms. Collier says, “in true New Zealand pioneering fashion.” — Bloomberg