Boozehound - Jason Wilson [69]
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