Six years beforethe first pour.

01

The question

Blue agave doesn't belong to a country. It belongs to a climate.

Agave tequilana — blue Weber — wants altitude, heat, hard drainage and a long dry season. Jalisco has that. So, it turns out, does the Atherton Tablelands: a basalt plateau an hour inland from Cairns, sitting 600 to 800 metres above the Coral Sea at 17 degrees south.

The obvious move would have been to make something that tastes like tequila and hope nobody looked too closely at the label. We went the other way. If the plant was going to grow somewhere new, the honest thing was to let it taste like somewhere new — and to stop borrowing the vocabulary of a place we aren't.

“Recognizable as agave but it's not Mexico.”

02

The place

The soil is red because the volcanoes left iron behind.

The Tablelands are old volcanic country. What's left is deep basalt loam — free-draining, mineral-loaded, and rust-red from oxidised iron. Water doesn't sit in it. Roots go down hard looking for it.

Then there's the weather. A monsoonal wet from December, and a genuinely dry winter that shuts the plant down for months. Agave grown in that rhythm swings between flood and drought every year of its life, and it stores sugar differently for it. You taste the mineral in the Silver before you taste anything else.

Read: why volcanic soil changes everything for agave →

03

The wait

You can't rush a plant that measures its life in years.

Six years between planting and harvest. There is no shortcut, no accelerated version, no way to make the piña sweeter faster. You plant, you weed, you wait, and the whole business model is a bet placed most of a decade in advance.

1. Year 0PlantedHijuelos — offsets from mature plants — go into the basalt in rows wide enough to work by hand.
2. Years 1–5Wet, dry, repeatFive monsoon seasons and five dry winters. The plant fattens, the leaves harden, sugar accumulates in the core.
3. Year 6Harvest by coaLeaves struck off by hand with a coa, leaving the piña. Machines can't judge ripeness — people can.
4. 2023First releaseSilver, Rested and Aged released together — the harvest year is printed on every label.
5. 2024–25Judged abroadEight medals across the IWSC and London Spirits Competition, tasted blind against the world's agave spirits.

04

The people

The distiller signs the label.

Every bottle of Agave Australis carries the name of the person who made it: Mark Watkins, head distiller at Mt Uncle. Not a brand ambassador, not a licensed marque — the man running the still.

Mt Uncle has been distilling on the Tablelands since long before there was agave in the ground here. The cuts are made by palate on a copper pot still, batch by batch, in a shed you can walk into on any afternoon of the week.

See how it's made→

05

The name

Australis means southern. That's the whole claim.

We call them Silver, Rested and Aged. Not blanco, not reposado, not añejo. Those words describe a Mexican appellation with rules we don't sit under, and using them would be a costume.

It is not tequila. It cannot legally be, and it doesn't want to be. It is 100% agave spirit made in the southern hemisphere, in a place with its own soil, its own weather, and — as of now — its own casks.

Read: why we don't use the Mexican terms →

Judged blind against the world's agave spirits at the International Wine & Spirit Competition and the London Spirits Competition, 2024 – 2025.

“Recognizable as agave but it's not Mexico.”

“Rich flavours of vanilla and caramel… deep complexity.”

Buy a bottle

Taste what this country does to agave.

Order direct from the distillery, or find Agave Australis behind a bar or on a shelf near you.

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Ships Australia-wide from Mt Uncle Distillery · 18+ · Also stocked at the distillery shop ↗ · Trade: sales@mtuncle.com