Australia's Tamborine Mountain Distillery's artisanal approach to making spirits

Arranged on the shelves are dozens of hand-painted bottles. There are vodkas with clean, crisp infusions: ginger, wild citrus and the native Australian lemon myrtle leaf. There are also brightly flavoured liqueurs: honeydew melon, banana, violetta. Varieties of schnapps, aquavit, grappa, absinthe, and a pink Lilly Pilly Gin round out the range.

The unsuspecting imbiber would assume such a collection is borne from commercial-sized stainless steel vats overseen by workers in white coats. But it's quite the contrary.

Tamborine Mountain Distillery is perched high in the Gold Coast hinterland. Owners Alla Ward and her husband Michael embraced the artisanal movement before it became a corporate catch cry.

Alla makes every batch of spirits in a hand-made copper pot still, tweaking the flavours with each distillation. The fruit and botanicals are harvested from their 1.3 hectare property, and are grown without pesticides or other chemicals.

While Australia's wine industry is well developed and driven by local players big and small, spirits lag much further behind. Five players control more than 80 per cent of the market, according to a study by The Australia Institute, an independent think tank.

The Wards have found that Asian visitors especially like their fruity liqueurs, more so than the vodkas, with honeydew melon, peach and passion fruit. With an eye on the Asian market, Alla is experimenting with a durian fruit liqueur but stresses the drink - which has a "fried onion character" - is still very much a work in progress.

The distillery is now looking for a China distributor, having won the China Wine & Spirits Awards Asia-Pacific Spirits Producer of the Year 2013 Best Value, with individual drinks also being recognised. The banana and honeydew melon liqueurs took golds and the violetta a double gold.