Have you ever sipped a spirit that transported you to a different time and place? That’s the kind of magic the team behind the legendary Alameda-based St. George Spirits tries to create, says head distiller Dave Smith. The former English teacher and winemaker runs the distillery, which is known for its gins, vodkas, whiskeys and eaux de vie, alongside master distiller Lance Winters.
We caught up with Smith recently to learn more and to hear about the distillery’s fragrant new Valley gin.
Q. What drew you to the distilling world?
A. Distillation is just magic — there are amazing sense memories and aromatics. I thought I’d try this out for a year and then bounce back to the wine industry, travel and write. That was almost 20 years ago. I just fell down the rabbit hole and discovered a whole new language to share stories through distillation.
Q. Storytelling?
A. Storytelling through distillation — and the same argument goes for winemaking, brewing or for being a writer, a painter or an interpretive dancer — should be something that’s uniquely yours. There’s a process to create something that’s got a thumbprint and an identity to it.
Distillation is a beautiful vehicle for this, because you are not only working in fermentation sciences, you’re also working in the realm of perfume. You’re trying to use alcohol as a carrier pigeon for your actual message, trying to tease out the flavors and capture something. That something could be as simple as citrus or raspberries at their peak of ripeness. Or it could be a more complex act to arrange all of these botanical ingredients to create a sense of place.
That’s something that we’ve focused on for a long time here in the Bay Area. Our Terroir gin is a project that goes back 12 or 13 years now. It didn’t start out as a gin, it started out as a walk in the woods with Lance picking up his son in the Oakland Hills, breathing in the air, experiencing the landscape and wanting to capture it.
It took some time to discover it wasn’t just about Douglas fir. It’s also about coastal sage and wild fennel and juniper, trying to recreate this landscape and put that message into a bottle.
St. George Spirits’ Valley Gin was made to evoke the feeling of sitting on the hillside on a warm day looking out over an orange grove, says distiller Dave Smith. (Courtesy Jason Tinacci)
Q. What’s the story of Valley gin?
A. We’ve worked with orange blossoms from the Kirkpatrick family at Lindcove Ranch, just outside Visalia for about a quarter-century. Originally we worked with John Kirkpatrick, the patriarch of the family. And last year, John passed away. Lance and I were at John’s celebration of life, making cocktails for the guests, breathing in the air and finding inspiration in the legacy of John.
We’d worked with orange blossoms in a lot of ways over the years, but found it important to capture when you’re sitting on the hillside, looking out at these groves of citrus trees, breathing and feeling the heat of the sun on your skin. Our greatest joy is to try to capture something like that, to be inspired by it and put that into a bottle, and then share that with someone else.
We’ve found over the years that people respond in different ways. If they’ve got a sense memory of that time and place that we’re trying to share, all the better. But people will interpret it with their memories. And we’re greedy for those experiences. When we create something where you don’t have an intellectual response but more of an instinctual response, we’re activating a sense memory. Whether you love it or hate it, you are basically catapulted to that memory. That’s a really amazing and beautiful thing. That’s part of what we love so much about the art of distillation: that we’re able to manipulate a person emotionally in the best possible way to create that sense of place. And hopefully happiness, joy and something that transcends just alcohol in a glass.
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Q. What is it about your distillation process that gives your spirits that sense of place?
A. St. George Spirits was America’s original craft distillery. We were founded in 1982 in the Bay Area by a gentleman named Jorg Rupf from the Black Forest region of Germany. The heritage of St. George Spirits is an eau de vie distillation — that’s a fancy name for unaged fruit brandies. It’s about the raw materials and capturing a sensory snapshot of what the harvest is like that year. We work really hard to honor those raw materials and act as caretakers throughout this process so we can show their best expressions.
Gin is defined by having juniper present, and there are a lot of traditional ingredients that go into gins outside of juniper, like coriander or peppercorn. For us, it’s really vital that when you smell and taste it, it has a thumbprint — and in this case, that it’s evocative of the valley and what that represents at its best. We use not only peels from lemons, limes, Valencia oranges, Seville oranges, bergamot oranges and grapefruit, but we also use fresh orange blossoms harvested at the ranch. That gives it these beautiful jasmine floral aromas. Fresh dill has this great, slightly citrusy, lemony, green tone to it. And cucumber helps soften those edges of the blossoms. And then nutmeg and peppercorn give some zestiness to the mouthfeel and help to break up some of these aromatics.
You start to look at all these botanicals as paint colors. We’re just trying to paint a landscape and use each of these in a really intentional way. Ideally this is a gin that is beautiful neat, at room temperature in a glass — even though I know very few people will ever try it that way — and in a cocktail.
Details: St. George offers distillery tours (from $35) and tastings by appointment. The distillery and bottle shop are open from 3 to 7 p.m. Fridays and from noon to 6 p.m. on weekends at 2601 Monarch St. in Alameda; https://stgeorgespirits.com/.
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