Most wine labels don't start on a kitchen floor, but ours certainly did. After spending the night celebrating the 2022 harvest party in Beechworth, my sister Leila, our friend Juliette and I sat on Leila's kitchen floor, eating dumplings out of a tub and scheming a way to fund a holiday together.
At the time, Leila was working in wine across Australia and France, Juliette was wine repping, and I was a creative in agency land. But when a text came through our groupchat at 10:57pm the following Friday asking, "Why don't we start our own wine label?", there was no going back.
The three of us had met half a decade earlier in Beechworth when Juliette moved to Australia from France, so we settled on a name that meant something special to us – a representation of our international friendship.
Since then, we've spent our days brainstorming potential labels and branding, tasting, harvesting, sampling boxes, fermenting and waxing in fry pans we found in the discount rack at the Beechworth op-shop. There's been pruning and BAS, GST and netting. Thousands of blue dog cuddles, emails, deliveries, Google searches and late nights. Even more early mornings, and hours on the road or in the air. Corrupted files and photoshoots, pop-ups and reviews, designs and equipment purchases, screen printing and regular printing. We've racked lees and driven forklifts, taped and stacked, pressed and colour-matched. It's been three and a half years of figuring out the answers to our own questions, amazing suppliers and stockists, -2-degree after-work beers (the only way), and, best of all, family and friends.
Eventually, two varieties turned into seven, and 12 stockists into 150, and Foreign Friends became more than just a way to fund a holiday. It became the business we are proud of today.
Foreign Friends was created to bring people together – friends new, old, and unsuspecting – and we hope we are doing just that.
In the future, we hope to turn our focus to viticulture, growing our own grapes and building a place for Foreign Friends to call home. We can't wait!
And yes, we finally did take that holiday... only last month!
