FROM WINE TO SPIRITS
A spirited approach Many wine producers are looking to making spirits particularly with the current fascination for gin, Ted Bruning an experienced observer of the drinks sector, puts the case.
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In some respects, a vineyard is not unlike a smallholding. In particular, they tend to be somewhat cramped; to get by they have to squeeze as much as possible out of what acreage they have. But the nature of their operations means they have to tackle the job in different ways. For smallholders, it’s diversification: the goats pay the bills with their milk, meat, wool and hides; the little extras come from marginal crops such as poultry, top fruit, hedge fruit, garden produce, logs, kindling, and wild forage. Vineyard owners have few such opportunities because vines, to be blunt, are a monoculture. Maximisation can only come from intensification. Nevertheless, skilled viticulturalists can play limitless chords and arpeggios across the keyboard, even more so since it was discovered that many parts of England proved ideal for sparklers. The méthode champenoise is the ideal elaboration of English wine, producing undeniably world-class wines as a bolt-on to existing businesses and thereby adding a hefty premium. But we’ve done that now: what next? The answer ought to be to invest in a hand-beaten Portuguese copper pot-still, or a space-age German column-still, and press start. Let marc, eau-de-vie, brandy, palinka and hand sanitiser trickle into your spirit receiver and watch the money gush out. Sweet, eh? But the industry has shied away from distilling, and few English wineries can boast a copper to polish. When brandy is a natural extension of winemaking and can command such a good price, why are winemakers so afraid of distilling? It’s probably not the capital commitment. You can buy a 200l pot-still that will sit in a corner and take up no more than 6’ x 6’ for under £2,000, but there’ll be carriage and all sorts of extras, including a condenser and steam coil, that will push the price up to more than twice the cost of the still; then there are barrels at anything up to £250 for a 54-gallon hogshead. So even doing it on the cheap isn’t that cheap and does involve you in lots of preparatory work; tiling and pipework as well as assembling the whole shebang yourself. The alternative is buying a still via a consultant who will have it shipped and installed for you, albeit at a price. You could spend a fortune, and many people do. But the point is that you don’t
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