MiKo · Kiwi Brandy
Old Spirit.
New Traditions.
Distilled from mountain kiwifruit (Actinidia chinensis var. deliciosa) grown in its original terroir.
Explore the Source.
One valley in the mountains of Jiangshan — four places that make MiKo what it is. Tap to travel.
The Spirit
What’s in the bottle
A kiwi eau-de-vie distilled from Xuxiang kiwifruit in its original terroir — three ingredients, a copper pot still, and an annual vintage.
- Category
- Kiwi brandy / eau-de-vie
- Fruit
- Xuxiang (徐香) kiwifruit
- Ingredients
- Kiwifruit, water, yeast
- Fruit per bottle
- More than 20 lb
The Fruit That Left China.
A Chinese fruit crossed an ocean, lost its name, and conquered the world. This is how it happened — and how it came home.
Chapter 1 · 700s – 1900
The Monkey Peach
For a thousand years the fruit was wild, Chinese, and named for the monkeys who loved it.
Curtis’s Botanical Magazine (1914) · Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons c. 750A poet writes it down
The first identifiable description of the kiwifruit plant appears in a Tang dynasty poem by Cen Shen. In China the fruit is called míhóutáo (猕猴桃) — “macaque peach” — because monkeys loved it.
- Song dynasty herbal manuscript (placeholder)1100s
Cultivation and medicine
Song dynasty records document cultivation and medicinal use. The vine is no longer only foraged from the forest; it is tended, valued, and written into the pharmacopoeia.
Li Shizhen, Bencao Gangmu (1603 ed.) · Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons 1500sInto the great compendium
The fruit is recorded in the Compendium of Materia Medica. It grows wild across the Yangtze basin — including the mountains of Jiangshan, where this story eventually returns.
_1.jpg)
The Source
The Orchards
Xuxiang (徐香) kiwifruit grown at elevation in the hills around the village. Named for the Xu family who first cultivated it; locals also call the green kiwi Cuiyu (翠玉, “jade”).
More than twenty pounds of fruit go into every bottle. Annual harvests mean every bottle carries a vintage — a specific year, a specific season, on a specific hillside.
The People
The Village
Guangdu Cun (广渡村), a village of roughly a thousand people in the hills of Jiangshan.
Here, surplus and imperfect fruit has been distilled into spirit for generations — the family recipe MiKo is built on. Nothing about it was invented for a label; it was already the way things were done.
The Landscape
Jianglang Shan
Three red-rock Danxia peaks rising above the orchards — a UNESCO World Heritage site, inscribed in 2010.
The nearby Xianxia ancient road is known as the “Road of Poetry of the Southern Song,” with over a thousand classical poems written along it. The terroir has been worth writing about for a very long time.
The Craft
The Distillery
In Jiangshan City, we distill in copper pot stills and rest the spirit in traditional clay pots.
Three ingredients: kiwifruit, water, yeast. Nothing hidden.
The Ritual
How to Serve
Quzhou is the seat of the Southern Confucius family. Ritual — li (礼) — is the quiet machinery by which an ordinary act becomes a meaningful one. A pour becomes a welcome; a glass becomes a gesture.
Serve MiKo neat, at cool room temperature, in a small tulip glass. Let it open for a minute; the aroma arrives before the spirit does.
Or over a single large cube, with a twist of green citrus — a slower way to meet the fruit. However you pour it, pour it for someone.
Send yourself a postcard.
Pick a view from Jiangshan and we’ll mail you a real one — and let you know when MiKo is ready.
The Village
Wish you were here. — Guangdu Cun, Zhejiang.
On the list, you’ll get
- Exclusive access to launches
- Invites to private events
- Recipes, stories, and behind the scenes