Category: Patron Only Posts

We started the application process for our alcohol license back in February thinking it would only take a couple of months, based on our in-depth research and conversations.  Turns out, that wasn’t quite the way things worked out. 

Despite not owning a winery or planning to sell our wine through a physical tasting room, we still needed to license our building and ensure it was fit for purpose *before* applying for the alcohol license itself. Crazy right?

So, we did all that and then moved on to the alcohol license itself. That was very straightforward. The only thing we needed to do on top of it was let everyone in our community know our intentions via our local paper. 

But! The wording we had to use made it sound like we were going to open a tasting room or liquor store or something on a residential block. So, we had to assure a concerned neighbor that we were definitely not going to open up a nightclub and wouldn’t actually be making wine inside a house lol.

Fast forward to six months later and we are now officially licensed to legally sell alcohol in Aotearoa New Zealand! 

Wine is highly regulated both within New Zealand and the USA. So, this is an incredibly important milestone for Responsible Hedonist. It means we’ll be on the up and up as we move forward with securing grapes, winery space, and distribution into the USA.

We’re very happy we can finally check this one off the list!

In our last video, we talked about how we’ve decided to export our wines into the USA and why that decision made sense from an environmental, financial, and long-term perspective. This video details the other factors that also went into our decision to make wine in 2022 vs. this year. 

In short, we weren’t going to be able to make a high quality, tasty wine, that stayed true to our values. We may compromise on some things, but quality and responsible winemaking aren’t one of them. 

We’ll be reaching out for your mailing addresses so we can send you something to thank you for all your support this year. We would not have been able to get this far without you!

We’ll share our plans for 2022 with you in the next couple weeks, which so far  involve a storied area of Aotearoa New Zealand (it’s not Marlborough), organic grapes, and a whole lotta logistics planning.