Richard Gunner clearly remembers tasting his first really good Australian vermouth. “It was about 10 years ago,” he says. “At Rootstock [wine festival] in Sydney. I tried the Maidenii vermouth and I just went, ‘wow!’ It blew my head off; it was so good.”

It was also, at that time, one of only two or three locally made craft vermouths. The drink had been deeply unfashionable for decades. You rarely saw a bottle in a bar – and when you did, it was probably some unloved and oxidised Cinzano, a relic from the last time vermouth was trendy, in the 1970s.