Maidenii

Maidenii was started in 2011 by Gilles Lapalus, a French winemaker who had worked at Sutton Grange in central Victoria, and Shaun Byrne, an Australian bartender then at Gin Palace in Melbourne. The pair shared a question that had not been seriously answered: what would an Australian vermouth taste like if its botanical character drew from native Australian plants rather than the Mediterranean herb library that defines European vermouth? The first batches were small and bartender-distributed; the line scaled to commercial release with Heathcote rosé as the wine base.

The wine base is fermented from Heathcote-grown grapes as a rosé, then fortified to 16–19% ABV with grape spirit and aromatised with a botanical tincture infused into a portion of the wine. Twelve of the thirty-four botanicals are native Australian — strawberry gum, wattle seed, sea parsley, river mint, lemon myrtle, native pepperberry and others — sourced from foragers and small Victorian growers. The native botanicals provide a distinct flavour signature that distinguishes Maidenii from European vermouth: dry-eucalypt, citrus-balm, peppery rather than the warm-Mediterranean profile of Italian or French houses.

The classic Maidenii line covers Dry (19%), Sweet (16%) and Classic (16%) vermouths in 750ml plus 375ml half-bottle formats. Beyond the vermouth core, the house produces Kina Quinquina aperitif (the bitter aperitif at 17.5%), Roselle Bitter, Yuzu Vermouth (a citrus-led variant) and Amer Nocturne (a darker bitter at 21.5%). The wine base provenance — Heathcote — places Maidenii in the Victorian small-batch food-and-wine scene rather than the conventional spirits supply chain. The house name honours Joseph Maiden (1859–1925), New South Wales government botanist and director of the Sydney Botanic Gardens, who catalogued Australian botany at a moment when much was still being scientifically described.