Eau-de-vie flavour bombs

Capreolus Distillery is a world-class eau-de-vie distillery, and the only one of its kind in the UK. Each and every fruit gets touched twice when sorting. Hours of hyper-vigilant fine-tuning goes into the distillation process. Kilograms of fruit fit into a single shot of spirit. But founder and distiller Barney Wilczak doesn’t even fit into his own distillery.

Eau de vie is a fruit-based brandy or spirit, made by fermenting fruits and distilling it twice. You may have heard of schnapps, or even geist – every country has its own name for the fruit brandies it produces, but in the Cotswolds, Wilczak has settled on… well, eau de vie.

There’s an abundance of local fruit to work with – classic apples and pears, berries, damson, quince, cherry – and what Wilczak makes each year depends on the fruit available. At 6ft 4in, he’s constantly craning his neck and crouching under the roof of the distillery (a lean-to shed in his garden). Unless he’s sitting down to fuss over his dog, he’s never fully upright. There’s this way he moves and carries himself that humbles him to his product. He’s more than happy to warp and contort himself around his equipment, stain his hands for three weeks from the fruit.

“I don’t know if it’s coming across,” he says, with a deadpan face. “But we’re very focused on quality here.” These painstaking methods – the picky fruit selection, the hyperprecise final distillation, a lack of obsession on yield (sometimes 3,000kg of fruit will make just 180 litres of spirit) – are pretty converse to mass-produced brandies and eaux de vie.

And it pays off. Us drinks types are always banging on about a “sense of place”. Also referred to as “terroir”, it’s this idea that what you have in your glass could only be from the place it was grown and produced. Tasting these eaux de vie, you get this sense of place. Of the rain on raspberries, of the leaves of the blackcurrant, the sense of bramble. You taste all these connected elements in a single drop, which is perhaps why they’re so adored by cocktail professionals.

Drinks columnist Alice Lascelles referred to Capreolus’s products as the “secret handshake” in the cocktail world. Once you remember the slender form of the bottles, recall the letterpress label, the red ink noting the year, ABV, bottle number and distiller with cherry-red ink, you’ll notice it winking at you from the shelves of any bar worth going to.

Ryan Chetiyawardana – whose cocktail bars span Shoreditch’s Seed Library and Washington DC’s Silver Lyan – describes them as “flavour bombs to be used in overt and substrata ways”. One cocktail served at his bars that does both is the Raspberry Lemonade, which is easily enough tried at home. A dash of Capreolus raspberry eau de vie added to good champagne gives “a brightness with blossom and rose goodness”.

Or do as Wilczak suggests and add a small amount to the middle of a raspberry – it’s like raspberry to the power of raspberry, and tasting it like this justifies every meticulous step in the spirit’s creation.

So much of Wilczak – and the type of production and farming he stands for – fits into a single glass.