When Chantal and I started Kinglake Distillery, we sold our houses, gave up our jobs, borrowed from our families and maxed out our credit cards — all to build a whisky distillery that wouldn’t make its first meaningful returns for years.

Looking back, the obvious question is: why on earth would two people with three young children choose to do that?

We both sold our houses. I sold my business in the French Alps. We borrowed heavily from families who weren’t particularly well off, and we still had to max out all our credit cards.

We gave up our jobs, too, which meant the money we scraped together had to do more than build a distillery and fill enough barrels to get us started. It also had to support our family for two or three years with no income at all.

With three children under five, we moved in with Chantal’s parents on the family farm to save money wherever we could.

It was, by any measure, a reckless thing to do.

And yet, once we had made the decision to build Kinglake Distillery, neither of us ever questioned it.

So why were we so convinced?

Part of it is simply how we are wired. We both have a huge appetite for challenge and adventure. But I personally also have an enormous fear of missing opportunities because I was too cautious or waited too long.

There is something strangely liberating about putting everything on the line: once the road back is closed, you have no choice but to find a way forward. You stop asking whether it will work and start asking what you need to do to make it work. I have a deep-down belief that commitment is one of the biggest drivers of success. When you have genuinely committed to something, you find reserves of determination and resilience that you simply don't have when there is always an easy way out.

I’ve always loved Kipling’s poem If, particularly its idea of risking it all and, if it fails, getting up and doing it again.

But there was something much bigger motivating me.

My great-grandfather was a small farmer in England, and although that farm was sold many years ago, I sometimes wonder whether my wider family still carries something of that life in our DNA — a slight wistfulness for having a place that is truly ours, that is rooted in a particular piece of land and connected to generations before and after us.

I think that is part of what motivates me to build Kinglake. I want to create something that is deeply rooted in a place and that can endure beyond us. Something that gives our children, and hopefully their children, that same sense of belonging — of having somewhere they can point to and say, this is ours; this is where our family put down roots.

A single malt distillery is one of the hardest businesses to build because of the enormous time lag between making the whisky and being able to sell it. You are effectively making decisions today for customers you may not meet for decades.

But if you are prepared to accept the challenge, you start to see the business differently. You start thinking about planting oak trees that may not be mature for decades. You think about laying down barrels that might still be maturing long after you have forgotten the day they went into the warehouse.

You stop thinking only about what you can achieve this year and start thinking about what you can leave behind. That idea of legacy is a huge motivator for me.

I like the idea that Kinglake might still be here in 50 or 100 years. That people who have never met Chantal or me might one day walk through the distillery, taste a whisky we helped create and know that it all started with two people who decided to take a chance.

In some ways, it feels more like building an old English church than a Metricon home.

We get to enjoy the quick wins, the setbacks and the failures of the business year by year. We get to watch the whisky develop, the buildings evolve and the property slowly change.

But alongside all of that, there is the pleasure of knowing that we are building something on a much longer horizon.

Something that, hopefully, will outlast us.

And for me, that is the real vision for Kinglake.