Boozehound (24 page)

Still, it’s noteworthy that El Diablo, Patrón’s master distiller, is one of the few I’ve met who’s candid about this nebulous issue of luxury. After all, it’s become fashionable in cocktail geek circles to turn one’s nose up at Patrón. It’s too big, sort of like the Darth Vader of premium tequila, right? Too many ads, right? It can’t possibly be good. Well, let’s be clear about one thing: if it hadn’t been for Patrón entering the market in the late 1980s, there wouldn’t be a premium tequila market in the United States. You’d still be drinking Cuervo Gold. Bagging on Patrón reminds me a little of teenagers who hate a band as soon as it becomes famous.

It also, strangely enough, sounds like the sort of debate that routinely happens in the wine world. Yes, to enter the world of tequila is to slip down a rabbit hole. Which probably proves that it is much more complex than most people think.

Fruit Forward

For most Americans, “fruit” is not the word that immediately comes to mind when they hear “eau-de-vie.” If eau-de-vie evokes any words, those might be: intense, burning, foreign. Or if one thinks of fruit, it’s the whole pear sitting inside a curious bottle. Some home cooks may have purchased a bottle of kirschwasser long ago to attempt a real fondue. But as I have said, Americans mostly steer away from clear European spirits that are served neat in small glasses.

“These are hard-to-sell, expensive products that no one likes,” jokes Stephen McCarthy of Clear Creek Distillery in Portland, Oregon, which makes some of the nicest eaux-de-vie in the United States, including one with the pear inside the bottle. “People just aren’t getting the message.”

I wish that were not so. Near the midpoint of my winter doldrums, in particular, I miss the abundance of seasonal fresh fruit. Maybe that’s why one of my winter drinks is an eau-de-vie after dinner, just a bit of poire Williams or kirsch or a plum brandy called slivovitz. Eau-de-vie is a delight and, with its digestive properties, a fabulous way to finish a meal. Unlike liqueurs, which often have a cloying percentage of sugar and a lower alcohol content, eau-de-vie is clear, unaged brandy, generally clocking in at around 80 proof. Although many still think of eau-de-vie as Alsatian or alpine, there are a few wonderful producers in the United States.

The domestic market was basically created in the 1980s by two men: Stephen McCarthy, and Jorg Rupf of St. George Spirits in Alameda, California, which produces the amazing Aqua Perfecta brand of eau-de-vie (and also, it should be said, Hangar One vodka; gotta pay the bills, right?). Both McCarthy and Rupf came to the business in a roundabout fashion. Rupf grew up in Germany’s Black Forest in a family of distillers but went into law and became Germany’s youngest judge at the time. On a scholarly visit to the University of California at Berkeley, he fell in love with the local fruit and decided to stay and distill it. “Seeing the blossoming fruit in California,” he says, “it was like the Garden of Eden.” McCarthy ran a successful business producing parts for hunting guns, which took him on sales trips to Europe. There he realized that the Williams pear, used to make the French eau-de-vie poire Williams, was the same as the Bartlett pear grown back home on his family’s orchard in Oregon. In the mid-1980s, he sold his business and started Clear Creek.

Both men’s epiphanies get at the heart of eau-de-vie: ripe fruit. For centuries, eau-de-vie was the product of peasant farmers who, after harvesting their orchards, needed a way to turn surplus fruit into profit. “These products weren’t created by a marketing committee,” McCarthy says. “Those farmers made eau-de-vie because they had to figure out some way to use their fruit.” Eau-de-vie was a way for struggling farmers to keep their land.

“If the fruit doesn’t have it, the eau-de-vie never will,” said Lance Winters, Rupf’s partner in St. George Spirits. In making eau-de-vie, “you’re taking an aromatic and flavor profile of a moment in time and place. It’s a time machine.” For that reason, Rupf seeks out organic pears grown at over five thousand feet in Colorado and Montmorency cherries from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. McCarthy uses local Pacific Northwest plums and cherries for his slivovitz and kirsch, and even springtime Douglas fir buds for a complex, surprising evergreen eau-de-vie.

All of that sounds like just the sort of handcrafted, Slow Food–friendly product that foodies should be all over. But that’s not the case. “The biggest hurdle is that we do not yet have a digestif culture,” Rupf says. “As soon as coffee and dessert comes, so does the bill. In Europe, when you have your table, you have it for the whole night. An eau-de-vie is a wonderful culinary tradition.”

One place where they do have a digestif culture, and a taste for eau-de-vie, is Austria. For several years, I’d been told by people ranging from bartenders to other distillers to Eric Seed that there was a crazy guy named Hans Reisetbauer who lived on a farm in Austria. And Hans made just about the best eau-de-vie in the world.

So during one September harvest, I finally was able to arrange a too-short, one-day layover in Linz. I took a thirty-minute taxi ride along the Danube River to Hans’s farm—the landscape so lush and green, dotted with pointy church steeples and groups of blond schoolkids waving to us as we passed, as if in a scene from
The Sound of Music
.

Hans can be described as
big
—tall, substantial belly, booming voice. And there’s something rather untamed about him, too. The day I met him, he emerged unshaven, his long gray hair swept back, and shook my hand. “You know the secret of a great eau-de-vie?” he said. “You do a good job in the orchards! Then the job of fermenation and distillation is so easy and nice. Just don’t fuck it up!” He took me directly out into his orchards, driving his SUV into the middle of the plum trees. Then he jumped out of the truck. “Here!” he said, grabbing a bright purple plum off a tree. “You have to taste this plum! We have 2,500 trees here and they are the best plums in the world. We planted these trees in 2004, and this is the first year they’ve been ready for harvest.” It was a pretty delicious plum.

“Are you making slivovitz?” I asked, referring to the traditional eastern European plum brandy.

“Well,” he said with a big laugh, “We say plum brandy, not slivovitz. Slivovitz is usually a little rough, low quality.”

Though Austria has become well-known as a wine producer, this region near Linz is too cold and rainy for wine grapes. The soil and conditions, however, are some of the best for orchard fruit. Hans grows 70 percent of the fruit he distills, including pears, apples, cherries, and apricots, and gets another 10 to 20 percent from neighboring farms. “You have to work with the fruit, not against the fruit. For eau-de-vie, you need perfect ripeness for each fruit. If it’s not fully ripe, there’s not enough sugar and too much acid. But the challenge is that all this is different for every fruit.”

The fruit ratios that Hans distills from are insane: twenty-five pounds of pears or apples to make one liter of eau-de-vie; almost forty pounds of apricots for one liter. Hans once made a tomato eau-de-vie from dozens of varieties of heirloom tomatoes. “The first and last tomato eau-de-vie in the world,” he said. “Never again.” He and the local farmer washed and peeled all the tomatoes by hand. It took more than sixty-five pounds of tomatoes to make one bottle, and they made three hundred bottles. “One liter cost five hundred euros! It was really only for some extreme clients.”

We ate lunch as Hans does every day: with his family (including his mother and father and his children) and his entire staff, the meal cooked by his wife. The farm has been in Hans’s family since 1956. In 1990, Hans had been kicking around for several years as a young grad student in Vienna when his father called and said he had to come back home to the farm. “I said, ‘I will only come home if I can plant fruit trees.’ But, to be honest, I had never even seen a distillery before I started.” In 1994, he distilled his first pear Williams eau-de-vie. He only had fifteen trees, and only made one hundred bottles, but with that batch he won a championship in Austria as the best pear Williams. Soon, prestigious restaurants from Vienna were calling with orders.

“But for me, the money is not the motive,” he said. “I want to be the best distiller in the world. This is my life. I have no traditions. We have learned everything on our own. Each year we try something a little bit different. A little bit finer, a little more elegant, a little more pure.

“I have learned more from wine producers than spirits producers,” he said. “In Austria, we have about forty thousand distillers. There are three or four that are perfect, maybe ten very good, and maybe twenty that are just good. And then there are 39,970 shitty distillers. My ten-year-old daughter knows more about distilling than these guys.”

“Are there any distillers you respect?”

“I can’t tell you … None!” he boomed.

And then it was time for the tasting. It felt like something I’d been waiting my whole life for. Hans’s eaux-de-vie are like nothing I’ve ever sipped, and I spent more than three hours tasting about thirty different bottlings. Carrot eau-de-vie? Ginger eau-de-vie? Rowanberry eau-de-vie? Plum brandy that’s been aged six years in mulberry wood casks? He served me one made from wild raspberries, handpicked in Serbia, sixty-five pounds to make one liter. He only made six bottles, and Helmut Lang bought three bought of them. “This is the most expensive eau-de-vie in the world right now, eighty euros for 350 milliliters.” The most fantastic of all for me, though, was the quince. Let me read you my scribbled tasting notes from the quince: “Fucking amazing. End of story.”

It wasn’t just the aromatics that were so compelling, which is often the case in mediocre eaux-de-vie. The flavor was spot-on. “For me, a spirit is not a perfume,” said Hans. “It is something to drink. It must have the flavor of the fruit.” I really did not want to leave, but eventually Hans had to take me back to Linz, and I had to leave my little eau-de-vie fairy-tale land.

“Why is eau-de-vie such a hard sell in the United States?” I wanted to shout as we drove back along the Danube. Well, to be fair, price is a major issue. If you find Hans’ eaux-de-vie in the States, they usually carry price tags of fifty to one hundred dollars, and that’s for a half-sized 350-milliliter bottle.

Hans knows firsthand how challenging the U.S. eau-de-vie market is. The first time Hans came to America to sell his eau-de-vie, in 2001, he and his partner dressed in traditional Austrian costume. “No one wanted to buy our eaux-de-vie,” he said. “They wanted to buy our costumes.”

Desert Brandy

I thought I knew pisco pretty well. We’re friends. I started drinking pisco sours about a decade ago, right around when the ceviche trend was up and coming. In fact, as a critic for a city magazine in the early 2000s, I was moved to call the pisco sour “infinitely more elegant” than either the caipirinhas or mojitos that most bartenders were still just learning how to make. Pisco: a grape-based brandy—clear, not aged in oak—with a bracing and rough 80-plus-proof kick if you drank it straight, which you never did. You used it in a pisco sour or a pisco punch. The Peruvians and Chileans were always arguing over who invented it and who should control the name. Beyond all that, what else did you need to know?

Then I went to Peru, and realized that I hadn’t really known very much at all about my friend pisco. I was traveling with a few bartenders from San Francisco: drinks writer Jordan Mackay, and three fellows—Walter Moore, Carlos Romero, and Duggan McDonnell—who planned to launch a premium pisco called Campo de Encanto in 2010. On this trip, Romero, the master distiller, and Moore and McDonnell, his American partners, were developing their
acholado
, or blended pisco.

Lima is a great culinary hot spot, with a cool, overcast Mendocino-like climate. But we rolled out of Lima on a bus ride south. No bathrooms on this five-hour ride, but all the B and C American action movies you could hope for. After Vin Diesel in
xXx
, we took bets on what movie would come next. My money was on
Iron Eagle
, with Lou Gossett, Jr. I lost when a dubbed
Superman III
began. The landscape soon turned to desert. We passed the historic port of Pisco and arrived in the viticultural center of Ica, which is surrounded by giant mountains of sand. There is almost no rainfall there. Who knew you could grow grapes in such a place?