Kinglake has never won a gold medal. In fact, in seven years we've never entered a single whisky competition and there's a very deliberate reason why.
When we put together the recipe and process for Kinglake whisky, we had a very clear idea of what we wanted to create. But when it's your own product, there's always the nagging question of whether you're capable of judging it objectively.
That's one of the very good reasons for entering whisky competitions. You pay to have your whisky tasted blind by experienced judges alongside its peers and get an independent assessment of its quality.
For us, though, there was always something about the way the results were presented that didn't quite sit comfortably.
Most competitions award medals. And perhaps because I grew up watching the Olympics and World Championships, when I hear that something has won a gold medal, my instinctive interpretation is that it won, that it was judged the best.
That's not actually how most whisky competitions work.
A gold medal generally means that a whisky achieved a particular score or crossed a quality threshold. There can therefore be many gold medals awarded within the same competition, sometimes even within the same category.
To put that into perspective, in 2025 around 60 Australian whisky producers entered the country's five major spirits competitions. Between them, those competitions awarded around 50 gold medals for whisky.
At Melbourne Royal alone, 16 of the 103 Australian single malts entered received gold.
That doesn't mean the medals aren't deserved. Quite the opposite: those whiskies have been tasted by experienced judges and judged to meet the standard required for gold. And I completely understand why distilleries value that independent recognition and are proud to put those medals on their bottles.
Our hesitation has always been about what the medal communicates to the person buying the whisky.
There are multiple competitions, multiple gold medal winners within them, and usually an overall trophy or Champion Whisky as well. So, over the course of a year, it's perfectly possible to have dozens of genuinely gold-medal-winning Australian whiskies and several different whiskies that have each legitimately won some version of "best Australian whisky".
None of that is wrong. But unless you understand how the awards system works, it can give a different impression from reality.
One thing we've always tried to be particularly careful about at Kinglake is being completely open with the people who buy our whisky. We never wanted to put a gold medal on a bottle knowing that some customers might reasonably interpret it as meaning something different from what it actually does.
So, we made a fairly simple decision very early on: we wouldn't enter whisky competitions. And to this day, we never have.
That doesn't mean we don't want independent opinions. In fact, because we don't enter competitions, they've probably become even more important to us.
Over the years we've built up a network of people whose judgement we trust, both here and overseas. In Australia, that includes some of the country's most respected whisky bars and retailers, such as Whisky & Alement, The Elysian, Whisky Den, Nicks Wine Merchants and Casa de Vinos. They taste our whisky, sell it alongside some of the best from around the world and, importantly, tell us what they think.
We also send our whisky much further afield. Serge Valentin, who writes the wonderful Whiskyfun in Europe, has reviewed Kinglake numerous times and given us some incredibly detailed tasting notes. Summerton Whisky Club provides another perspective from the UK, while people we respect within Singapore's whisky community give us a view from one of the world's great whisky markets.
For us, that's ultimately more useful than a medal. We don't particularly need to know whether a whisky crossed the line for gold, we want to know what someone whose palate we respect actually thought when they drank it.
And perhaps most importantly, we want you to judge what's in the bottle for yourself.
