Grapes Are Not The Only Fruit

Picked at peak ripeness, Cotswold apples, pears, quinces and damsons are now being made into the first British eau de vie. Jane Wheatley experiences a taste sensation at the Capreolus Distillery

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BARNEY WILCZAK was a curious child, absorbed in natural history and the properties of different plants. In his teens, he was making cider—not your common or garden scrumpy, but a delicate sparkler, using the méthode champenoise and tipping away the results until he achieved something he was happy with.

In his twenties, he worked as a photojournalist, specialising in conservation, photographing rare and threatened botanical species around the world. However, four years ago, working at a biodiversity hot spot on the China-Burma border, he felt homesick. ‘I wanted to be in one place, with my partner, Hannah, and a dog,’ he recalls. ‘I had to find a different way of earning a living.’

Mr Wilczak thought of making eau de vie, a clear spirit produced in eastern and central Europe by distilling fruit. He used Google Translate to pore over textbooks— there was no literature in English—then shut himself in his father’s greenhouse with a small hobby still, experimenting with wild fruits such as rowanberries and sloes.

There was, he reasoned, plenty of topquality fruit grown within a few miles of the Cotswold family home, but he wasn’t sure anyone would buy the results, so he made gin instead.

You might think this wasn’t such a smart move—joining every other Tom, Dick and Harry jumping on the boutique-gin bandwagon of the past few years. However, that would be reckoning without Mr Wilczak’s capacity for taking infinite pains. He went back into the greenhouse to try combinations of 140 different botanicals: ‘I made hundreds of iterations and was aiming for complexity.’