The legend of Hokonui leads back to one family: the McRaes. After almost a century as criminals, Southland’s most famous whisky producers have emerged as folk heroes. Their story is told in Gore’s Hokonui Moonshine Museum and celebrated each year with a food and whisky festival.

The home of the McRae clan is the Kintail district, in the western Highlands of Scotland. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the Highland Clearances drove thousands of Scots from their properties to make room for large sheep farms. Recently widowed and seeking better fortunes, Mary McRae decided to join her three brothers in the South Island of New Zealand. With her fours sons and three daughters, she packed up the family belongings, including a copper and brass whisky still, and sailed to Dunedin in 1872. The family settled in the Hokonui Hills, near Gore.

Whisky-making had been a Scottish tradition for generations, the earliest known distillation being recorded in 1494. In 1644, the Scottish parliament introduced a duty tax on whisky, which drove the practice underground. The term moonshine originally referred to “occupational pursuits which necessitated night work, or work by the light of the moon”. In Scotland, the McRaes didn’t view distilling and selling whisky as illegal. They thought of it more as an inalienable right. The whisky tax was considered an imposition by the English and therefore to be ignored on principle.

In the 1870s, whisky in New Zealand was imported mostly from Scotland and Australia and was frequently so watered down it was said “A dram was often offered a chair as it didn’t have the strength to stand up.”

A licence was required for brewing or distilling alcohol in New Zealand, and any sales were subject to excise tax. To the McRaes, undercover whisky-distilling was second nature and they hid their still in the creeks and gullies of the Hokonui Hills. Mary McRae had trained as a domestic distiller in Scotland, but nearly everyone in the growing local clan made whisky. Mary’s eldest son, Murdoch, was perhaps the best known. He saw distilling as a natural extension of farming.

The McRaes made whisky in time-honoured fashion, putting it through more than one distillation. Yeast and sugar were purchased from local stores, and malt was prepared in the traditional way by grinding sprouting barley into paste, although later generations found it easier to obtain it from the local brewery. The wash barrels were kept well hidden with the still. The copper condensing coil, or worm, was the most precious part of the still and was brought on site only for spirit-making.

The McRaes started selling their whisky quietly, confining their clientele to professional people such as doctors and lawyers, who were unlikely to talk. The whisky-makers had a policy of not selling their spirits “into any house where it would do harm”.

The unlabelled whisky, delivered in bottles, cans and milk billies, became known simply as Hokonui. It was said to compare with Scotland’s best. Mary McRae lived to be 94 years old, and believed she owed her long life to her regular dram.