The Still Life Stories may be the only project of its kind.
It’s all about whisky but it’s not about whisky.
It’s about finding the stories behind the people who, at one point in their lives, said to themselves, “Wait a minute, I don’t want to do this; I want to quit everything and start a distillery.”
It’s about being there and listening and observing and immersing and absorbing the atmosphere of a place and the culture.
It’s slow. It takes a week or two or maybe even a month because the stories are all about time.
It’s not about tasting notes.
It’s about the cafe on Fohr Island.
And Jan Hinrichsen.
And Paul Shand.
And Peter Bignel.
And William McHenry.
It’s about being on the side of Mt. Arthur and wallabies in the morning.
And that 30-year-old whisky club in a pub in Adelaide.
And that Whisky Stone on the counter of the Cellar Door at McHenry Distillery.
And about a flagpole maker and a mailman who met while picking their kids up from school and decided to put an old still on a stove to make their first batch and thankfully not blowing up the house.
That’s what The Still Life Stories is about.
If you want tasting notes, there are plenty of places to find that. But if you want to spend some time with the fearless makers of wild spirits, you spend some time with The Still Life Stories.
I’ve shot a lot of video all over the world, but this is one of my favorites. It’s long and slow and leisurely. When I sat down to edit, I couldn’t bring myself to turn it into a compressed, short-attention-span jumble of noise. The place is Lawrenny Distillery in Tasmania. It was a sunny but chilly day, and Joe, the head distiller, had picked me up at my little hotel in Bothwell, Tasmania, for an hour-long drive through the Tasmanian countryside.
We left at 7:00 AM.
I hadn’t even had a cup of coffee. We started off in the distillery with Joe talking about the operation, then Ross ambled in.
Ross Mace had purchased the property decades ago and had planted the formal gardens. Then one day Bill Lark, whom everyone in Tasmania refers to as The Godfather of Tasmanian Whisky, was fishing in the river behind the farm, came in to chat with Ross in the huge barn, and mentioned that it’d make a great distillery.
And now, many years later, it did.
The film is slow and peaceful, just like the gardens and the river wandering behind the house.
