Bend Ze Knees, And Ze Elbow, Please

The Age

Friday May 26, 2006

JANINE PERRETT

A ski instructor who spends half his time in Austria is making schnapps, writes Janine Perrett.

MOST ski instructors are content with just drinking schnapps, but Brad Spalding managed to build his own distillery and launch an entire business around the drink.

Within one year his Wild Brumby brand, Australia's first home-grown schnapps, has become a favourite of the NSW skiing set and will hit the Victorian snowfields this season.

But far from being a winter-time novelty, it is poised for an even wider market, and managing that next stage of growth is the main challenge for Spalding.

"If I increase production how do I maintain the quality of this premium product?" he asks.

It's a good question for a perfectionist who uses only quality fruit, destalking every item and discarding any with blemishes, and who even grows his own raspberries for his range of flavoured schnapps retailing for about $27 a bottle.

It might sound a steep jump for this 48-year-old ski instructor, but his experience managing the Thredbo ski school for many years helped hone his business skills; that and a fierce determination to achieve his vision.

"I always knew there was going to be an opportunity to make a great Australian schnapps of a fine quality that people would enjoy," Spalding says.

The mix of snow, spirits and small business is a family theme. Spalding's father was a publican who helped build the Albury Ski Club in Falls Creek. His wife Monika is an Austrian ski instructor who comes from a family of schnapps makers.

A talented painter, Spalding studied fine arts and design at university before he was seduced into skiing. He has spent 56 winters in a row between the Australian and Austrian snowfields.

"I ended up at Innsbruck University studying sport and a lot of guys there were distillers, so that's where the interest really started in not only drinking it but making it," says Spalding.

Under the guidance of some of the best European experts, he began experimenting with his own fruit-based schnapps and researching the Australian market.

Sales of the imported product were about $20 million a year but apparently in decline at the time Spalding bought his picturesque Jindabyne property five years ago and began the painstaking process of opening a distillery.

"We thought, 'great, this is going downhill', but then I talked to the Thredbo Alpine Hotel, which was really helpful," says Spalding.

"They said skiers are still drinking schnapps, and if it is good quality and made from fruit, we think we can actually increase our sales."

The business model was narrowed to focus on local consumption with a strong emphasis on tastings and cellar door sales as visitors to the ski fields drive past the front gate on the Alpine Way.

The still alone cost $180,000 to import and set up, and then there was the lengthy wait before Spalding could produce anything or sell a drop of alcohol. These days it is rare to give a distillers' licence to such a small operator.

"There was a lot of paperwork," he says. "To get a licence to distill and manufacture, I had to go through a lot of hoops, and it took a lot of time and effort because it was so unusual for the size of this."

He must also pay hefty excise taxes when the alcohol is made - not when it is sold - which means a careful eye must be kept on production to avoid a cash-flow crunch.

Despite the bureaucratic obstacles, the Thredbo Valley Distillery opened in Easter in time for the ski season last year, but it was the surprisingly strong sales over the summer months that boosted annual sales 40 per cent above expectations and prompted a rewrite of the business plan.

Spalding is now accelerating plans to broaden his customer base. "My focus has gone from producing for the cellar door and selling into the local market into where do we go from a wholesale point of view, what is the strategy from a distribution point of view?"

His first challenge is to meet the demand outside the snowfields. As skiers return home to Sydney, they are asking for the product, but as yet Spalding has not found the right distributor.

"Because it's a premium product, you would need a bottle shop in the upmarket suburbs where the skiers live - say a small independent bottle shop in the right location," he says.

His marketing efforts have included taking flyers to ski lodges and holding regular tastings, which Spalding does himself, even taking along his squeezebox to provide entertainment.

"My passion is to make it - I'm the only distiller here, the only one who can operate the still," he says.

Apart from his wife, the only other full-time employee not only does the bottling, but also helps with everything from growing the raspberries, peeling the mangoes and even laying the cobblestones.

Spalding says the distillery can easily increase capacity tenfold from its 5500-litre production. But he's not sure he wants it to expand too rapidly. "I want to maintain the quality and don't want to corrupt anything," he says.

It reflects the dilemma of an artist (Spalding's distinctive ski school paintings are a fixture around Thredbo) who does not want the business side to overshadow his craft.

He is confident that with the systems now in place, he can delegate tasks such as cold-calling to others while he concentrates on the distilling side.

"My main ambition is to make the great Australian schnapps," he says.

CHALLENGES FOR WILD BRUMBY THREDBO VALLEY DISTILLERY

? Increasing distribution outside ski areas

? Maintaining high quality with increased capacity

? Delegating sales and marketing to concentrate on distilling

© 2006 The Age

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