Today I'm talking to Sarah Bonoma from Dancing Sands Gin in Golden Bay, Aotearoa, New Zealand. This is the second in a series of special edition features showcasing New Zealand suppliers and producers to celebrate the launch of New Zealand Trade & Enterprise's 2022 Made with Care campaign in Australia. A global initiative designed to raise awareness of New Zealands superlative produce, Made with Care shines a light on thoughtfully created and ethically manufactured food and beverages the country is famous for. New Zealand is recognised all over the world for its commitment to creating environmentally conscious, sustainably minded food and wine. This is not a sponsored or remunerated piece, but when I was asked if I was interested in something a little adjacent to Conversation with a chef and I read about the campaign, I jumped at the chance.
Dancing Sands distillery is in Takaka, a tiny town at the top of the South Island and nestled between the Abel Tasman and Kahurangi National Parks and looking out over Golden Bay. It's a stunning part of the world. The Dancing Sands name comes from the Dancing Sands Spring,one of the freshwater springs within Golden Bay's Te Waikoropupu Springs, some of the clearest and freshest water springs in the world. Dancing Sands Gin is double distilled, and the botanicals are vapour infused before the spirit is blended with water sourced from the aquifer thatfeeds Dancing Sands Spring. They had me at gin made from incredible spring water, but there's even more to the Dancing Sands story and I loved chatting to Sarah and hearing about love, moving across the world and starting a distillery.
Hi Sarah, how are you? Thanks for your time today.
I'm very happy to chat to you.
I'm in Melbourne and it's 1pm and I know it's 3pm in New Zealand, where are you?
Right now I'm in my home office in Tasman at the top of the South Island.
Do you have an amazing view out your window?
It's pretty nice. Right now the sun is shining and theres lots of greenery and trees. Autumn is here so everything is a beautiful red-brown colour.
Lovely. I was looking on your website and the photos are so glorious. Golden Bay is beautiful and I know that reality does live up to the photos so I am envious that you are living there. I'm originally from Christchurch, which is also great but it's beautiful up in the Tasman.
Yes Golden Bay is a pretty special place. It's right at the top of the South Island for those who haven't been here before. And really the only reason you are coming to Golden Bay is to come to Golden Bay. There's one road in over a very windy hill and you are not on your way anywhere else. Once you're here, there's nowhere else to go. But it's very beautiful. We are bordered by the Abel Tasman and Kahurangi National parks; there's lots of beautiful scenery and lots of hiking and beautiful beaches. You name it, it's here.
It's so beautiful. How did you get there? I love that story. Are you happy to share that? You're from England and Ben's from the States and you're in Golden Bay.
Yes it's quite a whirlwind. Ben and I met through work. We were both working for multi-national companies in IT. We started a long-distance relationship and ultimately decided that we wanted to be together and to do that, we decided to move to New Zealand. We quit our jobs and packed up everything we had and moved to Wellington. We started off back in our IT careers in Wellington but ever since we had met, we had wanted to start our own business, so we were looking around for opportunities and throwing ideas around. We were originally looking at the brewing industry, but at that point in New Zealand, which was six or seven years ago, we really thought that ship had sailed. Through our research we discovered that in markets where you see craft beer taking off, you often see craft spirits following suit later on down the line. At that point there wasnt the amazing diversity of gin distilleries there is today in New Zealand. Ben was looking online and found a still for sale on Trade Me – which is like the New Zealand equivalent of eBay in Golden Bay, which is somewhere we had been as tourists when we had done a little tiki tour around the South Island when we first arrived in New Zealand. We had spent a couple of weeks camping in Golden Bay and we absolutely loved it. Our eldest daughter had just been born. She was 10 weeks old at the time. We decided to take a trip down to Golden Bay and have a look at this still. We always joke that it was the sleep deprivation of a newborn baby that made us decide that was the perfect moment to quit our comfortable corporate jobs and move to Golden Bay and start a gin distillery about which we knew absolutely nothing. But that is exactly what we did.
Obviously the still was very alluring, but was it the fact that Dancing Sands spring was there as well? Is that what drew you there?
Yes, obviously the still being there and Golden Bay being such a beautiful location; there's a huge variety of people here, it was a great place to be and then the water quality. The township of Takaka where our distillery is sits on top of an aquifer that comes out down the road at the Te Waikoropupu springs, the clearest springs in the world. It's an incredible place and has a lot of incredible meaning. Everyone in town is using bore water. We have amazing quality water, a beautiful location and it really inspired us to give it a go.
Did you also inherit some of the people who might know about making gin? How did you go about getting a team together?
Once we decided to start the business, we got a little 20 litre home still. New Zealand is one of the only countries you can distil at home without a licence. Ben started us off. We bought a bunch of books, did a lot of googling and learned the basics and learned the ropes. Initially when we started we had someone working with us who had some experience, but from there we taught ourselves. There was a lot of trial and error and learned the hard way quite a few times over the last few years and now we have a team of distillers we have trained based on how we learned to distil.
Distilling is a lot like cooking in many respects, or that's certainly how we think about it, which is; you know when you have made a good meal or a really excellent meal and it's the same when youre trialling a gin recipe. You can really taste when you've got the mix of botanicals right or when you have just done an average job. Ben, my husband, has done all of the product development on all of the products we have released and he has done hours and hours of R and D and working out what flavours work well together and which are easy to use and which are hard. He has basically put together all the recipes we have himself.
That's an incredible thing to do, to go from nothing to such a great knowledge base. Congratulations. How long has the company been going?
Just over six years. We started in April 2016. For the first 6 months, we shut the doors and figured out how to scale recipes from our little 20 litre still up to our production still and we sold our first bottle of gin in October 2016.
You'd have to really to like gin yourselves to be testing so much.
Luckily we met when Ben was living in New York and we used to go and drink gin martinis in cocktail bars in the good old days before children arrived. We really enjoyed gin as a drink, so it was an easy segue into making it. Although I have to say today, six years later Ben and I probably drink less gin than we ever have because it has become something that we are always tasting for work so we drink a lot less of it socially than we used to.
Distilling is a lot like cooking in many respects, or that’s certainly how we think about it, which is; you know when you have made a good meal or a really excellent meal and it’s the same when youre trialling a gin recipe. You can really taste when you’ve got the mix of botanicals right or when you have just done an average job.
What are the botanicals you use? There's a beautiful photo of the copper still on the website and I can see some herbs being waved around the entrance of it. What do you use?
Our core recipe is a spice forward gin, which is quite unusual for a dry gin, a lot of dry gins would traditionally put citrus in their botanical mix, but we decided we wanted to try something a little different. We use locally foraged Manuka which is a native shrub. It has an almost pine-like flavour to it, we use juniper berries, then we use peppercorns, cardamom, and coriander as well so a lot Indian peppery spice flavours. Then almonds which we use for mouthfeel. We also add liquorice root and Anjelica root. The liquorice root is beautiful. It gives it a wonderful aniseedy tail to the gin.
It sounds so delicious and it's probably a bit early in the day here, but it makes me want to rush out and try some of your gin. How many bottles do you produce a year?
Last year we put out around 45 000 bottles. We are selling in New Zealand and also exporting overseas to quite a few markets now. The production has grown significantly and we have just installed a new still. We are moving up from the still we bought six years to a new 700 litre hybrid still which will enable to keep up with the demand and continue to grow the business. When we first started, we also made rum from fermenting our own molasses and vodka but since our gin took off, we've had to sidestep those beverages so we are hopeful with the new still that we will be able to get back into those categories some time down the line.
Sure. As you say, gin has really taken off and there are lots of gin producers in Melbourne alone, so now that you are entering (and winning) awards, are gin makers a breed apart? What is it like being in a room of gin makers?
Absolutely. There's a great community of distillers in New Zealand and also internationally and that is one of the things I really enjoy about this industry. For example, in New Zealand, we have the Distilled Spirits of Aotearoa Association which is basically all of the distilleries and we share problems, ideas and join together to try and create better regulations and ways of doing things in the industry. And internationally, for example, I have had contact with Australian distilleries and others in the US when we have had problems we were trying to solve or questions to ask and haven't been able to find the answers to here. It is pretty common for a distillery to help out another with the answer and that has been really refreshing.
That's really good to hear. I like to think that communities are helping each other and not just in competition with each other. I think there is room for everyone.
Absolutely and for our industry we are all up against the big brands that you would know in a liquor store and I think our view is that it is much better to work together as a team than to compete against each other. We have great relationships with a number of distilleries in New Zealand and there's a gin event which is a pretty big thing here and I believe also in Australia, and its a great way to catch up with everyone. It's wonderful.
That ties in with my next question and you've really touched on the environmental aspect of Dancing Sands, but that sustainability and I think that can also be sustainability of people and communities as well, but could you talk a bit more to the sustainable and environmental aspects of Dancing Sands?
This is something we are very actively looking at at the moment. We have already made some small changes. For example, we are trying to remove plastic wrap from the distillery and we are using reuseable pallet wrap instead. We upcycle some of our waste material into other products, for example, we make a gin jam out of the leftover strawberries we have used in our sunkissed gin. Its delicious. We also partnered with another local business here called Global Soap and they upcycle our waste botanicals and waste wash. Thats what is left over after the distillation finishes. They have helped us turn that into a soap. But for bigger projects and ongoing, one of the things is looking at implementing a water recycling system for the still. When you are distilling you use water in your condenser to cool your vapour down and turn it back into a liquid and we would lie to get to a place where we can recycle that water rather than using fresh water. Certainly across the industry it is front of mind and there are a lot of great projects happening in this space. With every new product we make and decision we make, it is front of mind.
Finally, Sarah, what does it mean for Dancing Sands to be part of the Made with Care campaign?
We are really excited to be part of it. It's a great way for New Zealand to showcase some of New Zealand's food and beverage products and for us to be included is a real privilege. It's exciting to be able to connect with Australian businesses and consumers and show them what we have. We already have quite a following in Australia; we have a number of customers who regularly order our gin from us in New Zealand, so for us to be able to enter the Australian market in a more meaningful way is really exciting.
I could not believe, and I've lived here for 11 years, but my heart is still very firmly in New Zealand, and looking though the products, I felt so proud to be a New Zealander and excited too. I think New Zealand has always punched above its weight in many domains but it is lovely to be showcasing all those special products with absolutely ethical and environmentally sustainable practices as well and I just felt so proud. It's such a great campaign.
That's great to hear, Jo. New Zealand really does punch above its weight with what it produces, especially for such a small country, we do very well and we are proud to be part of that.
Thank you so much for your time. I'll let you get back to your Golden Bay idyll. It's quite grey and overcast in Melbourne so I think you've got the better end of the deal. All the best and it has been really lovely chatting to you.
Dancing Sands, Golden Bay, New Zealand