Bass & Flinders Distillery

Grape fruit in the distiller’s hands

Grapes set the method before the still does. Holly Klintworth, Head Distiller and Managing Director at Bass & Flinders Distillery on the Mornington Peninsula, Australia, works inside a grape-to-glass discipline that keeps the region close to the spirit. Her station is not separated from the house’s direction; she carries production and stewardship together, making decisions that touch both the bench-side detail and the way the family business presents itself. Klintworth describes the work plainly: “My name's Holly Klintworth and I am the Head Distiller and the Managing Director of my family's business - Bass & Flinders Distillery.” The sentence matters because it does not split title from duty. The maker, the distiller, and the person responsible for the wider house are the same pair of hands. The distillery does not state who trained her, or how long she has held the station, so the lineage that can be named here is the family business itself and the method she now leads.

A house style built from grapes

The central craft at Bass & Flinders is the grape-to-glass approach. That phrase is not decoration here; it is the structure of the program. Under Klintworth, the Mornington Peninsula is treated as more than an address, with grape material giving the distillery a way to carry place into spirit rather than leaning on a generic base. The method asks for a different kind of attention from grain-led distilling. Fruit brings its own timing, acidity, aroma, and seasonal pressure, and the distiller has to decide how much of that character should remain legible after fermentation, distillation, blending, or rest. No still capacity, batch size, or cellar figure is published by the house, but the working idea is clear enough: spirit begins with grape, and the finished bottle is judged against that origin. Cerise Gin and Angry Ant Gin were named winners at the 2021 London Spirits Competition, a recognition tied to this distillery’s house-defined way of working rather than to a borrowed style.

The still house and the family ledger

In a still house shaped by a family business, the technical gesture carries a second weight. Klintworth’s choices do not end at cut points or sensory trials; they return to how Bass & Flinders speaks about itself as a Mornington Peninsula distillery. That makes the room feel less like a detached production floor and more like a place where the ledger and the palate keep answering one another. The work is quiet by nature: fruit arrives, decisions narrow, spirit takes form. The public language around the distillery stays close to that discipline, especially when Klintworth names the business as her family’s and the role as both managing and distilling. Those two bottles remain the clearest named markers of Klintworth’s hand at Bass & Flinders.