“I’ve had people burst into tears tasting these – it takes them straight back to a moment in their past.” I have come to visit Barney Wilczak, an unusually soulful spirits producer, at Capreolus Distillery near Cirencester. We are surrounded by stainless-steel vats of his eau-de-vie, the clear, fragrant brandy that he distills from apples, gooseberries, cherries, pears, plums, raspberries, grapes, quince and various other fruits grown within a 35-mile radius of this sunny English hilltop.
I say “distillery”, which might make you imagine something vaguely industrial, but we are in fact in his dad’s garage, while the still itself is in the shed. But the liquids? My goodness. Each 60-litre container represents around 4,000kg of fruit, all picked within a day of ripeness, wild-fermented over months into fruit wine, then triple-distilled to exacting specifications that vary fruit by fruit and batch by batch. Obsessive doesn’t cover it. When Wilczak made his first batch of raspberry eau-de-vie, he reckons he hand-graded 2m raspberries, rejecting any with even the slightest imperfection.
It’s not hard to see why fancy restaurants are so keen to add Capreolus to their after-dinner trolleys (uber-chef Anne-Sophie Pic was an early champion). A tiny finger dip taste of the raspberry version reminds me why we call these things spirits: it takes me right back to the bushes in my great-granny’s garden when I was four or five and is more like having some intra-species communion with raspberriness than merely drinking something raspberry-flavoured.
If you’re thinking, “Wow, I bet that’s expensive,” well, yes, sorry. However, unlike many premium spirits, you can see precisely why it’s expensive (the pear and apple versions are just a shade easier on the wallet). And they’re so intense – like perfume – you can use them a little like cocktail bitters: a tiny drop utterly transforms a martini.
Wilczak opened in 2016 and his labours have since helped to focus interest on a category of spirits that is often overlooked. There are various styles of eau-de-vie made across Europe, often made domestically as a means of using up surplus fruit but sometimes hitting the heights of refinement. Kirsch, distilled from cherries, is a German/Austrian speciality; poire williams is an après-ski classic in Switzerland; slivovitz from plums is widely drunk across eastern Europe; Hungarian pálinka is a national obsession.
It is perhaps the most purely agricultural spirit , an expression of its particular place and maybe closer to wine in this regard than most commercial spirits. Wilczak, a former wildlife photographer, sees his mission as capturing not only the fruit itself, but the entire orchard: the blossom, the bark, the soil, the sensory memory of all of the above. “We are really reductive in the way we think about plants,” he says. “We say: this is the fruit and this is the plant, but that fruit has all the elements that make that plant, just in lower concentrations.”
Four fragrant eau-de-vies
Luxardo Kirsch de Cuisine £17.34 (500ml) Tesco, 25%. You bought it for fondue, now try it in a rose: 50ml dry vermouth, 25ml kirsch, dash of grenadine.
G. Miclo Eau de Vie de Marc d’Alsace Gewürztraminer £53.25 (700ml) The Whisky Exchange, 45%. Outstanding Alsatian distiller; outstanding Alsatian grape
Capreolus Raspberry Eau de Vie 2024 £134 (375ml) The Whisky Exchange, 43%. Raspberries in four dimensions. The others are all amazing, too.
Somerset Apple Eau de Vie £19.95 (350ml) Master of Malt, 40%. Unaged apple brandy from fine Somerset producer.
