Boozehound - Jason Wilson [68]
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.