Kiwifruit is native to China, where it grew wild in the Yangtze valley and mountain forests for millennia. Its classic Chinese name is ็็ดๆก (mรญhรณutรกo), "macaque peach," because monkeys favored the fruit โ a name recorded in Chinese sources for over a thousand years, appearing in a Tang-dynasty poem by Cen Shen and a 12th-century Song medicinal compendium Wikipedia: Kiwifruit. For most of its history it was a wild-gathered medicinal plant, rarely cultivated.
The fruit only became a global commercial crop in the 20th century: seeds were carried from China to New Zealand in 1904 by schoolteacher Mary Isabel Fraser, planted by farmer Alexander Allison (first fruit around 1910), and the "Chinese gooseberry" was rebranded "kiwifruit" in 1959 for export Te Ara: Encyclopedia of New Zealand. China is today the world's largest producer.
The distilling angle โ kept honest
Kiwi is a hard fruit to distill: high acidity, relatively low sugar, and delicate aromatics make it closer to the raspberry/Geist problem than the apple/Wasser one. There is no centuries-old kiwi-brandy tradition โ it's a genuinely new frontier, produced only as occasional craft one-offs. That's the honest and more interesting story: kiwi is new fruit entering a distilling tradition that is five centuries deep.