When Günter Rochelt and his brother Dietmar started experimenting with distilling wild rowanberries in their cousin’s garage in the Tyrol region of Austria in the 1970s, they could hardly have imagined that Günter’s tireless quest for quality would create a benchmark for eau de vie production worldwide, and a legacy brand for his children after he sadly passed away in 2009.
No longer in a garage but a purpose-built distillery in the village of Fritzens, 16 kilometres east of Innsbruck on a sunny plateau overlooking the Lower Inntal Valley, Rochelt is a family business where everything is done in-house, from distilling (in four, hand-hammered copper stills) to bottling, corking and even hand-applying the bottle labels. Heading up the operation is Alexander Rainer – Günter’s son-in-law – who takes great pride in explaining the company’s origins, guiding philosophy, and also its role in upholding local tradition.
Growing up in the Tyrolean countryside in the 1960s, Günter Rochelt had been raised to appreciate nature’s larder, values he passed on to his children. His daughter Julia has fond memories of searching for mushrooms in the forest with him, “picking arnica in spring, collecting honey from the beehives, tending to the herb garden, baking bread, exploring my grandfather’s orchard, and mashing the fruit after harvest,” she recalls. “He taught my sisters and me to respect nature and people. It was he who showed us how to appreciate all that is good, authentic and genuine.”
Günter had trained as a chef in Austria’s alpine ski haven, Lech am Arlberg, before studying at the world-renowned École Hôtelière de Lausanne in Switzerland. He emerged as a consultant chef and went on to work with restaurants and hotels, training chefs and advising businesses on how to improve their service and products. “This was just the perfect job for Günter,” says Rainer. “He had the mindset of a quality chef all his life. He strove for perfection. He was fascinated by and enjoyed quality – whether it was an expensive bottle of Burgundy or a Cuban cigar. It was never about the cost for him but about understanding what elevated something to a level of outstanding excellence.” Rainer recalls a conversation Günter once had with him about a fantastic ham he had been slicing and tasting while simultaneously working out how he might make the ultimate ham sandwich. “It was totally fascinating to him in that moment,” Rainer says. “That was Günter. No matter what he did, he had to do it to the very best standard possible.”
Rainer explains that it was Dietmar who first started experimental distilling, but that Günter’s insatiable drive for quality made him the perfect partner in their homemade schnaps project. There was also an element of preserving and even improving local tradition that was important to the brothers’ motivations.
The origins of schnaps (a German term used similarly to eau de vie in France, and which shouldn’t be confused with the American schnapps, which invariably takes the form of a sickly sweet liqueur) can be traced back to the Middle Ages and monasteries in the Germanic Alsace and Lorraine regions of central Europe. Monks then were distilling herbs and berries to create medicinal drinks. Fruits such as black elderberry were considered a superfood, and even hundreds of years ago, the idea that a shot of black elderberry spirit a day could keep the doctor away seems to have been widely accepted in the folklore of the region. “The use of rowanberry also has a medical background,” Rainer says. “It was known to help an upset stomach. A similar thing is true for juniper. So, the origin of distilling in Europe was almost certainly medicinal.”
Another factor in the birth of European distilling tradition was the simple pragmatism of making good use of a harvest with a very short shelf life. Farmers couldn’t necessarily sell their entire crop or even eat all the apples that they couldn’t sell or barter with, so they looked to preserve them as best they could – making fruit compote would have been one option. But making a distilled liquid was more appealing as it has a long shelf life and also the beneficial ability to act as a kind of anaesthetic against hard times for hard-working rural folks in a European winter. This is probably why almost every farmhouse in the foothills of the Alps and surrounding areas was making distillates for their own consumption a few hundred years ago.
“Actually, back then, the distillates being made in each household probably weren’t of great quality,” suggests Rainer. “A high-alcohol distillate served a purpose for the rural farmers and workers at the end of a hard day’s toil. So that is the historical tradition.” But in the mid-18th century, the Holy Roman Empress, Maria Theresa, made some schnaps decisions, bestowing the right to distil on only a special selection of farmhouses in Austria. She also passed laws to limit the amount that could be produced. These royal rights to produce schnaps still stand today: 2,500 of the region’s 4,000 distilleries still hold the right (without having to apply for additional licences) to make fruit distillates. For Rainer, this period in the second half of the 18th century marks the beginning of a new era of Tyrolean tradition where quality started to improve.
“People would come with their fruit to be distilled and eager farmhouses with the rights to distil understood that if they paid attention and really worked at it, they could make an excellent product,” he explains. Essentially, the move drove cooperation and put pressure on those who could distil to do as good a job as possible for their community.
However, when the Rochelt brothers began distilling in their garage in the 1970s, the quality of schnaps was far from universally brilliant. Thanks to a combination of post-war supermarket consumerism and a new era of cosmopolitan tourism, the word "schnaps" had come to represent an industrially produced mass-market distillate made for profit rather than pleasure. Further tarnishing the reputation of traditional schnaps was the fact that in the US, the word "schnapps" had been (mis)appropriated to describe sickly fruit liqueurs full of added sugars and flavourings to be knocked back as quickly as possible at ski resorts and by teenagers.
The Rochelt brothers’ motivation for attempting to make their own schnaps was two-fold. They wanted to restore the respectability of the tradition and push the envelope in terms of quality in Tyrolean schnaps (unadulterated fruit brandy), and use the apples from the family orchard that they couldn’t eat. They also wanted to take what was all around them in the village and the mountains nearby, fruit that people wouldn’t know what else to do with. The brothers learned and improved as they went along, honing their craft for around 20 years, during which time Günter would occasionally gift his clients little bottles of his homemade distillate. “His customers – a lot of whom were renowned chefs and hoteliers – also became his friends,” says Rainer, “and when they tasted the schnaps would always give him feedback and say, ‘What you’re producing in your garage is something we have never had before – you should really do more of this!’ and while Günter always maintained it was a hobby, the idea slowly worked its way through. When he was 49, in 1989, he decided to build his own distillery, and that’s where we are still based. We continue to be driven by everything Günter stood for. I think when people see our brand, and taste our fruit brandies, they think ‘this is a big company’, and then when they come to see us, they’re always surprised to see how small our operation is.”
Almost everything about what happens at Rochelt’s distillery is surprising to the uninitiated. It takes at least 60 kilograms of wild forest raspberries to make just one litre of their raspberry eau de vie. This in itself is extraordinary, but when you also consider how much effort is required to forage such a large amount of tiny wild raspberries in the forest – and then sort through the harvest by hand to pick only the most perfect fruit to go through to the mashing process – you start to get a sense of the labour of love that is taking place.
“Our family of growers and pickers, and the relationships we have with them, is key to what we do,” enthuses Rainer. “We never add anything in the whole production process – we simply pick the best quality fruit at perfect ripeness, select the fruit we want, mash it and allow wild fermentation before we distil – so the fruit really is the most important bit.” Understandably, Rainer is very particular about the fruit they use. “Each year, we expect to harvest around 10 to 12 of the 20 varieties of fruit we work with because if the trees don’t carry fruit of the right quality, then we simply don’t make that variety that particular year. I think that sometimes people don’t really understand this way of thinking, but I know that if I bring in a mediocre harvest, the very best I can achieve is a mediocre eau de vie.” Just as a winemaker obsesses over the ripeness of their grapes and precisely when the right moment to harvest is, so Rainer and the Rochelt team work with their partner suppliers to the same level of fastidiousness. “When you want to make a first-class product with just one ingredient, then that raw ingredient has to be perfect,” emphasises Rainer.
Rochelt works with apple growers who are happy to make multiple passes through the orchard during the harvest season to pick only the most perfectly ripe apples each time – rather than pick on one day and have a mix of ripe and not so ripe fruit. And with a team of around ten people, Rochelt can achieve what they need to. They can, for example, receive, hand-sort and mash 11 tons of quince in a single day. This will yield just 500 litres of eau de vie. Quince, Rainer says, is straightforward. Apricots, on the other hand, are more demanding. “The apricot varieties we use are very soft and juicy at maximum ripeness, which is exactly when we want to harvest them,” explains Rainer. “But like that, they are impossible to ship as they will bruise and be ruined by the time they get to us. So we send our mashing equipment and vats to the orchard, harvest the ripe fruit in small quantities, select the best fruit, prep it and mash on-site at the orchard. This means we can start the fermentation process within 24 hours of picking the fruit and preserve that brief moment of perfect ripeness in the resulting distillate. Our network of growers across Austria and Switzerland that we’ve been working with for the last 30 to 50 years is probably the most valuable thing that we have.”
Once distilled, Rochelt ages the 5-8,000 litres of eau de vie it makes annually in glass demijohns for several years to allow the complex flavours to marry. Rainer explains that there are at least 20 distinct flavours in a single apricot that the fermentation process can preserve. These need time to meld, and do so sealed only with a layer of linen cloth, allowing some of the alcohol – the angels’ share – to evaporate. This serves two vital purposes: it reduces the alcohol content while also concentrating the complex flavours. Only when Rainer (who is the head distiller) deems it ready to be bottled (at around 50% ABV) will the eau de vie be sent downstairs from the maturation room to be bottled in Rochelt’s distinctive and luxurious-looking green bottles.
The bottle design is derived from a traditional Tyrolean "pincer bottle" and was commissioned by Günter when building the distillery and creating the brand identity in the early 1990s. Rochelt’s modern interpretation of this centuries-old design is manufactured to exacting standards by local glass artist Alfred Ecker from Innsbruck – a further embodiment of Tyrolean authenticity and tradition.
Notably, each different variety of Rochelt’s eau de vie has its own unique sculptural stopper design, most of which have been designed by goldsmith Otto Jakob from Karlsruhe, Germany. Realised in zinc and stainless steel, each decorative stopper hides a pourer which enables precise and drip-free pouring. While the stoppers were created simply to celebrate the unique qualities of each eau de vie, their appeal to collectors is undeniable. Rare bottles of Distiller’s Reserve have the most sparkly stopper design: each is hand-decorated with more than 400 Swarovski crystals. Again, this is not simply decoration for decoration’s sake – Swarovski’s HQ is less than three kilometres from Rochelt, on the south side of the river Inn. It’s a further celebration of local Austrian craftsmanship.
Rochelt has even designed its own tasting glass, each handmade by glass artist, Patrik Winkler, in his workshop in Kufstein, 60 kilometres east of the distillery. The elegant but tiny tulip-shaped glass is designed to hold just 20ml of liquid, containing the bouquet within the glass. Just as the Rochelt bottle elicits a particular response from those who see it, so the glass helps to ensure people drink it "correctly". “We believe that once one of our fruit brandies is in one of our glasses, then it creates the right attitude towards it,” says Rainer. “It should be sipped at room temperature,” he explains, “the high point of enjoyment is on the palate.”
While eau de vie is, rather obviously, a French term (meaning water of life), it is a potentially confusing one given that it can be used to describe pretty much any distilled spirit. For example, it could be said that Calvados is an eau de vie made from cider, that Cognac is an eau de vie made from wine, and that whisky is an eau de vie made from malted barley beer. The word "whisky" is, in fact, an anglicised version of the Scottish Gaelic word for water – uisge – because whisky was first called uisge beatha, meaning water of life.
In France, there are 30 distinct eaux de vie appellations – but in English-speaking countries eau de vie refers to clear fruit brandies produced by fermentation and double distillation. Austrians refer to this as schnaps, and the French call this eau-de-vie de fruit as distinct from eau-de-vie de vin which describes various categories of spirit made using the grape matter left over from winemaking – the pressed skins and pips known as pomace (sometimes called must or marc), or from the fine lees.
Similar eau-de-vie de fruit beverages are produced in other countries and go by different names: rakia in Balkan countries (raki in Turkey); pálinka in Hungary. In Italy, an eau de vie made with grapes – specifically with the grape pomace – is called grappa, a protected name in the European Union and a spirits category all of its own. Burgundians do something similar to produce Marc de Bourgogne, while Fine de Bourgogne is made specifically with the fine lees.
What all of these eaux de vie have in common, whatever the name bestowed upon them by their makers and local tradition, is that they all make something out of nothing: the by-product of winemaking that might otherwise be discarded; the small, invariably tart varieties of fruit that fall just outside the "eating" category; or the wild fruit that can’t be farmed and has to be foraged. These tend to be what makers of fine eau de vie, such as Rochelt, look to take advantage of and transform into something wonderful, fragrant, ethereally subtle, and remarkably evocative. It’s almost miraculous how much of the essence of fresh, ripe fruit a double-distilled spirit can deliver when created with care and precision.
Take a sip, for example, of English distillery Capreolus’s raspberry eau de vie and the mouthfeel is rich and luxurious. It warms and soothes the throat, and then an almost magical, ethereal sense of fresh fruit takes over the palate. The length is astounding. It lingers and haunts, teasing the mind and summoning memories the way only distinctive and precise aromas and flavours can.
“This is why I love eaux de vie,” says Capreolus founder Barney Wilczak. “They can be so evocative and transportive. They have so much concentration (when distilled from their natural sugar and not made with lots of neutral alcohol as geist), and this brings that amazing length and also an elevation of hidden flavours.”
Like Günter Rochelt, Wilczak is self-taught and had been experimenting, honing his methodologies for several years before making the switch from professional photographer to full-time distiller. He draws similarities between the two endeavours, suggesting both are about putting yourself in and capturing a perfect moment in order to create a personal expression of it. “In a way, we’re looking to achieve the same thing with eaux de vie but with aroma and flavour,” he says. And what really appeals to him is the amplification distillation offers of “flavours [that exist] in miniscule concentrations that would normally be hidden from our palates. It strips away fruit acids and tannins to reveal a score detailing a year’s growth and the weather that shaped it.”
Wilczak remembers fondly nosing a glass of his Perry Pear eau de vie to write some tasting notes, and being transported to a place underneath the 300-year-old trees that bore the fruit. “Ripe wood, green wood, autumnal leaves, spice and the vegetation of a maritime climate,” he noted, “all bathed in that sweet and rich perfume of these indigenous pear varieties.” It took him 10years to reach a point where he was happy with his work capturing all of these essences, “closer to the perfumes of Grasse than most distillates”.
The idea that distillate can transmit more than simply the flavour of the fruit it was made with, but also the essence of a locality, is of paramount importance to Wilczak. He doesn’t use the word terroir, but the 1,000 Tree Apple Eau de Vie he produces each year is his way of capturing the unique flavours of a particular plot of land near his Somerset home – an orchard comprising 1,000 apple trees, each one a different variety. He’s taken this idea even further by producing a single-tree pear eau de vie.
While Wilczak is creating a new tradition of making wonderful fruit brandies in the southwest of England, making eau de vie is in Burgundian winemaker Jean-Marc Roulot’s DNA.
Domaine Roulot is world-renowned for producing region-defining white Burgundy. What is less well known is that the Roulot family has owned a still since 1866. Distilling is a “historic part of our activity”, Jean-Marc Roulot explains, and in the 1960s and '70s, his father, Guy, would spend four to five months of the year wheeling this still from village to village to make good use of it. “My parents used to say that the still paid for the vineyard.” Roulot learned how to make eau de vie from his father, and the tradition of making it is significant to him – although it’s not surprising to find out he’s interested in pushing the boundaries.
“Traditionally, we’re producing Marc de Bourgogne and Fine de Bourgogne,” he says. “I like them both, but my personal preference is for the Marc. Fine is more approachable in some ways, but Marc displays more terroir – it’s much more plot-specific.”
While Marc de Bourgogne has the potential to showcase terroir, it’s not actually allowed, according to the strict rules of the appellation. “You can’t produce different, named cuvées,” explains Roulot. “The only thing you can do is blend all your marc [from your various plots], blend them together, distil it, age it in wood for several years, and create a generic Marc de Bourgogne.”
The problem with this, for Roulot – who is the custodian of some of the most highly prized parcels of vinous real estate in Burgundy – is that terroir is lost. “If we can express individual plot terroir with wine, I don’t know why we’re not allowed to do that with Marc de Bourgogne,” he says. But he has a plan. “Because I’m interested in this, since 2017 I’ve kept my marc from five different plots separated – two village-level plots: Meursault Les Tessons and Meursault Les Luchets, and three Premier Cru plots: Meursault Charmes, Meursault Clos des Bouchères and Meursault Perrières.” Roulot will look to bottle each of these distinct plot eaux de vie separately, giving them a new name as he can’t call any of them Marc de Bourgogne. “I’m very excited about this as it’s a new thing for the estate, and it’s all about expressing terroir. I will call it Eau de Vie de Marc de Terroir.”
As well as the traditional Fine and Marc de Bourgogne, Roulot also produces fruit eaux de vie, as his father did before him. Guy’s "unofficial" Williams Pear eau de vie became something of a hit – it was known locally as Poire du Roulot. Roulot also remembers his father making small amounts of raspberry eau de vie too, and so, in 2008, started to reconnect with the family tradition of distilling eau de vie de fruit. Domaine Roulot now produces three fruit eaux de vie commercially: apricot, Williams pear and raspberry.
Never content with simply following tradition, Roulot is embracing new ideas here too. For his apricot eau de vie, he has traditionally been using organic Bergeron apricots grown by Laurent Combier (of Domaine Combier) in the Rhône Valley. But this year Roulot is excited about a new approach: making eaux de vie from four different varieties – Bergeron, Flavorcot, Rouge de Roussillon and Bergeval – all distilled separately. “Imagine,” he says with a sparkle in his eye, “a box with four bottles of different apricot eau de vie. Voilà!”
Whether it’s a way of capturing the essence of a particular terroir or the defining qualities of a specific variety of fruit, the aim of the eau de vie game is, Roulot reveals without a moment’s hesitation, “purity”.
Vittorio Gianni Capovilla is another maker of excellent eau de vie (of all sorts, not just from fruit) obsessed with purity. Born in Crespano del Grappa, a little village near Treviso at the foot of Monte Grappa in Italy’s northeastern Veneto region, Capovilla too requires somewhere between 30 and 60 kilograms of fruit to make just one litre of distillate. Each year he distils wild fruit, six to seven ancient varieties of pear, stone fruit, different types of apple – and, typically, more than 40 other types of fruit to make around 50 different eaux de vie every year – each the result of decades of perfecting his craft.
Capovilla (known locally as Il Capo) got into the world of distilling because he spoke German and because he was a mechanic. In the 1960s, he had a garage and workshop in Montebelluna near Treviso. One of his bigger clients was an industrialist who created machinery for winemaking, and Capovilla became his interpreter for dealing with German customers. In the mid-1970s, Capovilla left his workshop behind and began working full-time for his client and so entered the engineering side of the drinks industry. He discovered that the culture of making distillate was much more widespread in Germany and Austria than in Italy (even today Italy has just 120 distilleries compared to Germany and Austria’s tens of thousands) and he became interested in the idea of bringing the tradition to his neck of the Alpine woods. He bought an alembic still in Germany and brought it back to the foothills of Monte Grappa to experiment.
“I have tasted all the fruit that surrounds me on Monte Grappa, my native land, since I was a child,” Capovilla says. “As an adult, I have tasted many spirits and experimented with making my own, trying and trying again – I probably use ten times the energy of a normal distiller!”
Even now, in his 70s, Il Capo can often be found sitting 15 feet up an apple tree in his four hectares of organically farmed orchards during harvest season, biting into an apple to check its ripeness and flavour. If he feels the time is right, he’ll give the branches a good shake so that the ripe fruit falls onto carefully laid out nets below. Once the fruit has been hand selected and prepared, it undergoes wild fermentation for up to 15 days. Capovilla creates his eaux de vie and grappa using five stills that he designed in collaboration with German artisan distillery machine specialist Müller, which handmade them for him. He distils using the bain-marie method, which is slow and labour-intensive but ensures full extraction of all the hidden and refined flavours that makes his eaux de vie among the most highly regarded in the world.
His engineering and mechanical skills have come in handy too. “Sometimes, when you dilute your distillate down to about 45% ABV, the liquid can become cloudy. One way to get rid of the cloudiness is to refrigerate the distillate and filter it at zero degrees,” he says. Fascinated by what was happening to the liquid, Capovilla spent some time investigating the phenomenon (by freezing trays of distillate at different temperatures using an old ice cream freezer). He worked out that what was going on was to do with the concentration of volatile substances such as methanol (which is produced as a result of the effect enzymes have on pectin during fermentation). “I was in the world of wine machinery, so I worked with a company to make a prototype to separate and remove the methanol,” he explains. “It worked very well so I patented it in Germany and it’s called CASCO (Capovilla Spirit Condensing System).” How does it work? Because methanol is more volatile than ethanol, it evaporates at a lower temperature, so Capovilla’s device heats the spirit in a sealed chamber to a temperature where the methanol evaporates but the ethanol does not. The vapour rises, Capovilla explains, “towards an icy cone at the top of the device where it condenses, then slides down to a lip that traps the annoying spirit”.
Capovilla and his quest for perfection is revered around the globe, and the brand’s packaging reflects the handcrafted artistry involved in its production. The bottles don’t have sticky labels applied, but rather a cord is tied around the cork enclosure and neck before being sealed in a coloured wax appropriate to the fruit the clear liquid within is made from – “the colour of the taste”, as Capovilla says. Ingeniously, the cord can be snipped just underneath the wax closure to enable the identifying wax to remain intact on the top of the stopper after the bottle has been opened. The cord also functions to attach a handwritten tag that sports an illustration of what Capovilla describes as the “tree of wonders”– a fruit tree with several varieties of fruit on its branches – along with handwritten information about the eau de vie within. Actually, this handcrafted approach comes from the fact that Capovilla couldn’t afford a labelling machine but, as this story of eau de vie’s evolution – from something functional and pragmatic to something exquisite yet still gloriously artisanal – demonstrates rather well: necessity really is the mother of invention.
Explore all current listings of eaux de vie.
This article was originally published in FONDATA, Issue Two.
