Starting off in the world of wine, alternating hemisphere’s to get in 2 vintages a year, with a bit of travel thrown in between, was a fantastic time of our lives until the reality of the 2008 GFC hit home. Jobs dried up…literally NO-ONE was hiring. With all the qualifications and experience we had gathered over the years we knew we had to start thinking outside the box of what our future might look like.
After a fair bit of research and planning, our future looked a lot like CIDER. It fit alongside the skills we had, it was an exciting emerging product that was still relatively new for NZ and seemed like a slightly smaller hole in which to throw our hard-earned savings..hahaha!
A few off-handed conversations during a visit to Perth from Rowena’s parents, led to an opportunity for us to return to NZ and get started on developing a New Zealand cider brand with a range of kick-ass ciders that New Zealand was missing out on. We landed back on the NZ family property in 2011 focused on producing traditionally styled ciders made from real fruit; that were clean, dry, refreshing and affordable. We began planting our heritage apple orchard onsite and laying the foundations for the Cidery premise that same year.
