Share When the founders of Bass & Flinders Distillery on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula started making brandy in 2009, they decided not to call it brandy. Instead, they described their ambitious new product made from local chardonnay and matured in fine oak barrels, Ochre, as an “aged grape spirit”. At the time, co-founder Bob Laing told me this was because Australian brandy suffered from a terrible image problem. Too many people, he said, thought of brandy as cheap, low-quality and old-fashioned. “We’ve come a long way since then,” says Holly Klintworth, daughter of Bass & Flind...