In Rome, the genre-bending Santo Palato – a new-school trattoria by Italian chef Sarah Cicolini – is on the bucket list of many discerning diners visiting the Eternal City. Among them, during a recent peak-summer lunch, was Dave Verheul, the executive chef and co-owner of influential Melbourne wine bar Embla. He got more than he bargained for.   

Verheul knew the restaurant stocked Saison Aperitifs, the vermouth and amaro label he founded in 2020, but he didn’t realise quite how passionately it was being poured.

“We opened the menu and the whole vermouth section was Saison,” he says. “Selling vermouth to someone in Italy is like selling a bible to the pope – really satisfying.”

As was glancing two tables down to see Quique Dacosta, chef of the three-Michelin-starred eponymous Spanish restaurant, with a glass of Saison’s White Flowers vermouth. “It was surreal,” says Verheul.

Pinch-me moments have become common for the 48-year-old chef and Tash Menon-Verheul, his wife and business partner in Saison. We meet a world away from the romance of their Roman holiday in an industrial pocket of Altona, in Melbourne’s south-west. But this is where the real magic happens: la dolce vita, but make it bitter.

The winery occupies a cavernous warehouse behind a nondescript concrete frontage, in a row of identical adjoining buildings that gives no hint of the significance of what’s happening inside.

What started less than a decade ago as pure experimentation in a massive stockpot in the kitchen above Embla has quietly and organically burgeoned into a chef-driven booze brand with a serious following. Saison skilfully captures peak-season produce in deliciously bitter and beautifully bottled drinks, remixing fortified wine for modern times.

In six years, it’s established itself as a bookender on drinks lists nationwide among the first and last pours, and is mixed into cocktails at some of Australia’s finest restaurants and bars. You’ll find Saison on the menu at, among others, Gimlet, Zareh and Caretaker’s Cottage in Melbourne; at 10 William St, Bar Copains and Cantina OK in Sydney; Agnes and Milquetoast in Brisbane; Thelma and Hellbound in Adelaide; Mechanics’ Institute Bar in Perth; and Sonny and Lucinda in Hobart.

But it’s also going global, incrementally creeping into international markets. What do Hong Kong’s Bar Leone, The World’s 50 Best Bars’ current number one, and Copenhagen fine diner Kadeau, ranked 41st by The World’s 50 Best Restaurants, have in common? Saison.

“It’s not a wildly mainstream product, but it does show up in a lot of mainstream places,” says Verheul. “We’re in a nice niche.”

For the chef, obsession is the mother of invention. And Covid gave him (more) time to obsess. He’d long been into a bittersweet knock-off, preferring it to beer after a long service of tasting “highly flavourful, highly seasoned” dishes at the pass. So, when Embla pivoted to takeaway, Verheul tinkered away on his own drinks upstairs.

When he released his debut vermouth, it was something like the 16th iteration. That level of refinement “he still does today”, Menon-Verheul says.

Big Vermouth is “so cagey”, says Verheul. “You don’t find [recipes] anywhere. I always joke that you have to be in – or marry into – a European family to get that knowledge.” 

Trial and error were the only ways forward. “Everything we do is self-taught,” he says. “I didn’t come up doing vintages at wineries, I haven’t been to university to study this.” He learned every lesson “the hardest way possible”, including just how severely the star ingredient of his black walnut vermouth oxidises (“I had black hands for six weeks”).

But as a chef of 25 years, and one of Melbourne’s most accomplished, the New Zealander wanted to broaden his horizons to winemaking. “Same skill set, different medium, even more fascinating,” says Verheul. “It’s complementary flavours, complexity, layering. And working with natural ingredients. When you cook for a long time, you learn about micro-seasonality and the nuances that gives you. You try to mess with things the least but get the most out of them. We take the same approach [at Saison].”

His culinary expertise gives the drinks an edge akin to that of chef Michael Ryan, of Victorian destination diner Provenance, who creates the Beechworth Bitters amari.

For Giulia Giorgetti, co-owner of Melbourne wine bar Suze and “the biggest fan” of Saison, “it embodies the idea that a chef’s skills and creativity can extend beyond the kitchen and into the beverage program”.

Translating to “season” in French, Saison is “aperitivo made the long way”. “We make things in a very different style to pretty much everyone else,” says Verheul. “We go to extreme lengths and expenses.”

Springtime is synonymous with rhubarb vermouth. Nearly a tonne of fresh rhubarb is plucked at its prime from farms that have long supplied Embla, and cut – up until this year – by hand. Infused into a moscato-based wine, it’s bolstered by hand-picked magnolia, lavender and violet blossoms, and two Australian wormwoods, vermouth’s defining bittering agent. Then it’s aged resting on roasted rhubarb. “Most people would just buy one or two natural rhubarb flavours – essentially really highly concentrated essences,” says Verheul. 

Chef’s Table director and producer Brian McGinn found the drink so impressive that it drove him to profanity. He slid into Verheul’s DMs three years ago, unsolicited, declaring: “WTF. No joke. This is one of the most delicious drinks in history.” Now, as the biggest individual buyer of the rhubarb vermouth, LA-based McGinn has given himself the (unofficial) title of CHO: California Hype Officer. 

He’s not the only notable fan. When Coldplay toured Australia and New Zealand in 2024, one member – enamoured with Saison’s tinnies of amaro and tonic – emailed to ask where he could find them in London. “I was served one at the end of a very long lunch in Auckland,” he wrote. “It blew the cobwebs away and brought back the sunshine!” (For privacy reasons, Verheul and Menon-Verheul preferred not to share his name.)

Originally, Saison’s momentum was organic, but to truly harness it, Menon-Verheul joined the business in 2024. As the founder, Verheul’s built a ship to captain and, as the chief growth officer, Menon-Verheul plots its course. They see themselves as back- and front-of-house respectively, and the day Broadsheet visits, they’re dressed the part: Verheul in a micro beanie and a camo-coloured fleece, opposite a blazered Menon-Verheul at a table flanked by wine barrels. The business is the two of them, but if you go to the winery on a bottling day, you’ll find some of the city’s top chefs, sommeliers and bartenders – many from Embla – lending a hand.

In its infancy, Saison bunked with “a band of rogue winemakers” nearby in Altona, using a tiny corner of their co-production space. Graduating to its own comparatively huge headquarters earlier this year was “like going from a share house to our first apartment”, says Menon-Verheul.

There’s plenty of room to grow, and this is a brand that needs it. “The last year has been wild for all the right reasons,” she says. “We grew by 50 per cent.” 

The former gym has been stripped of its grey paint job and motivational quotes. On one wall is a towering work by street photographer Jesse Marlow that’s accompanied by the words, “THE CITY DOESN’T KNOW YOUR NAME”. (It couldn’t be less true of Saison.) All black-splashed, the winery has colossal windows spilling afternoon light over stacks of barrels and tanks, and pallets full of boxes emblazoned with Saison’s ultimate commandment: drink bitter.

Australia doesn’t have the well-worn vermouth culture of Europe, but our understanding has evolved beyond the bottles oxidising in our grandparents’ liquor cabinets. Most drinkers know the dry stuff is as essential to a Martini as the sweet stuff is to a Negroni. And locally made expressions, such as those by trailblazing producer Maidenii – rooted in native ingredients – have put Australian vermouth on the world map. 

Where old-school vermouths can go hard on spice and caramel for sweetness and colour, Verheul was motivated to divert from that path to see what would happen if he applied a lighter touch. “There was a real naivety around at the start,” he says. “No one was really doing it this way.” Saison’s drinks are fruit- and flower-forward, bursting with freshness and often speaking of one single ingredient, with Verheul intuitively fine-tuning from season to season in his uncompromising pursuit of perfection.

“Dave has done more for this category in Australia than anyone else,” says Sam Peasnell, who leads the beverage programs at Melbourne’s Etta and Daphne. “So often the ingredients list of a vermouth is so detailed that it is hard for any individual botanical to shine. Dave takes a more singular approach, and it shows as you can pick out every ingredient so clearly.”

A feat of hyperlocality and hyperseasonality was a limited-run amaro collab that used only heirloom radicchio varieties from the kitchen garden at Brae, a leader of farm-to-table fine dining. Verheul says there is precedent for this in Treviso – the Italian town prized for its namesake radicchio – but “you don’t really see [the amaro] outside Italy”.

 At your average bottle shop, those who choose a wine by its label might be uninspired when perusing the shelves of vermouth and amari. Labels tend to be samey and staid, or dark and brooding. “In this category, you are old Italian or you pretend to be old Italian,” says Verheul. Saison’s labels are a refreshing departure.

Designed by Bradley Pinkerton, they’re two-toned, often colour-drenched and, while ostensibly abstract, “everything means something”, Verheul says. As we sip spritzes charged with straight-from-the-barrel slugs of his Fallen Quinces vermouth – a celebration of “criminally underused” wood-roasted pineapple quinces – he explains its branding: “It seems like squiggly lines, but you’re looking up into a bare quince tree”.

In the beginning, Verheul was reluctant to spruik Saison to his industry mates for fear they’d only buy it out of obligation. Inevitably, they bought it and they loved it, and their “silent advocacy” is part of why Saison has stamped such a solid footprint on Australia. 

Now, the couple behind it is looking outward. They’ve been exporting internationally through distribution partners since the business was 18 months old, first to New Zealand and Singapore, then Hong Kong and Denmark followed. But the next step is a concerted effort to crack key markets in the northern hemisphere. With their one-year-old Leo in tow, they recently hit six countries in six weeks across the UK and Europe, popping up at Copenhagen festival 3daysofdesign. And Verheul just returned from a week of trade in the US; three new states will come online this year, joining Oregon and Washington. 

A newly minted partnership with Qantas, which lists Saison in its first class lounges in Melbourne and Sydney, will get it in front of even more worldly folks.

And in September, Saison will have a pop-up at Sydney Contemporary. “Baby’s first bar,” Menon-Verheul jokes. “Creative people have always been our people. We’re really focused on showing up in industries where our heart lies”.

Saison started small, with little ambition to grow it into a bona fide business. But as it did, slowly and steadily, its masterminds started to think bigger. To aid the expansion, they’ve raised an initial round of capital from a group they call Friends of Saison. Some are high-profile names, others are close friends, but what all the investors have in common is an obsession with bitter drinks and a belief in those by Saison.

“They spotted us early, they believe in where we’re headed, and are helping us shape what comes next,” Menon-Verheul says.

For a brand that’s had such a natural progression, scaling up is a delicate exercise. “So many people launch a product because they see a gap in the market, or they know the sector’s growing. It’s a really one-dimensional view,” says Menon-Verheul. “There’s something beautiful about creating something with such intent. Not everyone needs to appreciate that, but the people who do are our people. That’s where we grow.”

saisonaperitifs.com

This story is part of Broadsheet’s special Innovation Issue, presented by Mercedes-Benz. Drink responsibly. Cover photo by Peter Tarasiuk.