“Tradition, innovation, terroir,” is the tagline at Bridgeland Distillery in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and it’s a mantra that would fit at many craft distilleries across North America. Drilling down into how they do it at Bridgeland reveals a team with in-depth knowledge of traditional spirits—and when to break the rules in the service of local flavor and hands-on pragmatism.
Daniel Plenzik and Jacques Tremblay founded Bridgeland in 2018, and since then they’ve been producing whiskeys in various styles—American, Canadian, Irish, and Scotch—as well as grape-driven brandies, grappas—or “eaux de vigne”—and even Chinese-inspired baijiu.
While many of their spirits are terroir-driven—Bridgeland’s single-malt whiskey can trace its barley to a single section of land 75 minutes from the distillery—other products involve rethinking what those spirits can be, using the resources they have at hand to add character and value.
“We want our spirits to have a sense of place,” Plenzik says, “but we borrow from other traditions.”
As Local as Possible
For their award-winning single-malt—Glenbow Whisky—Bridgeland sourced grain from a single farm about 85 miles (135 kilometers) north of the distillery. That farm is also home to a craft maltster, Red Shed Malting, and it certified that the malt came from a single section of land—it’s NE4-37-27-W4M, if you’re keeping score. Tremblay says he hand-selected the barley after personally touring the farm.
“We love that the name ‘Glenbow’ is defined as a glen … on the Bow River, the mighty river coming from the Bow Glacier that is the base water of our whiskey,” Tremblay says. The distillery gets its own name from its location, in Calgary’s Bridgeland neighborhood—itself named for the bridges that cross the Bow just a few blocks away. One of those is the Reconciliation Bridge, featured prominently on the distillery’s bottles and branding.
Corn for Bridgeland’s bourbon-inspired whiskey comes from nearby Taber, Alberta, about 155 miles (250 kilometers) to the southwest in an area famous for the crop. (They spell it “Berbon,” to respect the U.S. tradition.) The Taber Corn Whisky won gold at the 2024 Canadian Whisky Awards—as did Bridgeland Wheat Whisky, made from 80 percent wheat and 20 percent barley from Red Shed.
The distillery also is aging a rye whiskey, using rye from Red Shed. A peated whiskey is in the works, too, since another Alberta craft maltster—Hammer Malt, near Edmonton—malts a local barley smoked with Alberta peat.
By working with these smaller maltsters, Bridgeland has earned an unusual distinction: It’s the only Canadian distillery that has been Craft Malt Certified by the Craft Maltsters Guild. (The guild has 14 member maltsters in Canada, including four in Alberta.)
When Life Gives You Grapes …
Even when Bridgeland can’t use local ingredients, it tries to control its process as much as possible by making what it can from scratch.
For example, Plenzik and Tremblay really wanted to finish Glenbow in port casks—but port is not exactly an Alberta specialty, and casks purchased from elsewhere can be unreliable. “When you buy a barrel from a broker, you have no idea what the port inside tasted like,” Plenzik says. “Then they transport it, and who knows what happens to it? And the barrel could be sulphited to hell. There’s a lot of risk in buying a used barrel.”
So—what else could they do?—they made their own port.
“When we were building, we wanted the best equipment for our whiskey and brandy,” Plenzik says. That includes their 1,200-liter Vendome Copper & Brass Works pot still. “So, whatever we do, we take no shortcuts. That’s why we made our own port—to have the barrel for whiskey-finishing.”
They imported Tempranillo grapes from California—known as Tinto Roriz in Portugal, it is one of the varieties used in port. They also used traditional port-making techniques, tailored to their own tastes.
“We find too many ports are sickly sweet,” says Plenzik, who is the more wine-passionate of the duo. “So, we fermented our port longer, to make it drier.”
Traditionally, makers in Porto use aguardente, a neutral grape-based spirit, to kill the yeast, halt fermentation, and strengthen the port to 19 or 20 percent ABV. Plenzik and Tremblay allowed a longer fermentation and then fortified their port to 22.4 percent ABV. They then aged it for one year in a new French Limousin oak barrel.
Initially, making the port was a means to an end—having a port cask in which to rest whiskey. But the fortified wine itself was both a unique product and a success. “We liked the port so much, we made two more barrels,” Plenzik says.
As with their bourbon, they didn’t sell it as “port”—it’s Porta Rossa, which means “red door.” But consumers understood it, bought it, and enjoyed it.
… You Make Brandy
“We asked ourselves, ‘If we make a really good wine, will it make a really good brandy?’” Plenzik says. “The answer was, ‘Yes.’”
Cognac is the gold standard in brandy, so it’s what other brandy-makers often try to emulate. “We went a completely different route,” Plenzik says.
The grapes used to make brandy are often a blend of those less suitable for making wine—typically lower in sugar, nonaromatic, and more acidic. At Bridgeland, the duo decided they wanted to make single-variety brandies. They made test batches from grapes as simple as Sultana, aka Thompson seedless—the most common supermarket grape—as well as pinot blanc, pinot noir, chardonnay, chenin blanc, colombard, and many others.
Eventually, they settled on two varieties to make two different brandies: Moscato, grown in California, and Gewürztraminer grown in neighboring British Columbia. Both varieties of grapes are highly aromatic, and that translates into the final spirit.
Famed brandies such as Cognac and Armagnac spend a long time in barrels—the VS, VSOP, and XO designations indicate increasing age—to marry and mellow the aromas and flavors. Plenzik and Tremblay decided that long aging wasn’t necessary for their own brandies, made from wines that they thought tasted great on their own. If other brandies are dark and mysterious—snifter, fireplace, good book—the Bridgeland duo see theirs as bright and lively, best enjoyed with friends and food.
The approach works—and the 2023 World Brandy Awards judges thought so, too, awarding a gold medal to the Moscato in the Brandy Aged 2–3 Years category. They also named Bridgeland’s Gewürztraminer-based grappa, Eau de Vigne, as the World’s Best Pomace Brandy.
Turning the Flywheel
That medal-winning grappa is just another extension of Bridgeland’s self-sufficient ethos. To recap: The Bridgeland team made their own wine so they could make their own port so they could rest their own whiskey in port casks; they also made their own wine so they could make their own brandies. Of course, rather than waste the grape pomace, they ferment and distill it.
Bridgeland is a young distillery, but that ethos could be a model for others looking to make distinctive spirits that belong to their place, made from raw materials that can be traced back to their sources.
Meanwhile, Bridgeland’s tasting room in Calgary must be the only place in the world you can taste a wine, a brandy and a port made from that wine, a grappa made from that wine’s pomace, and whiskey that rested in that port’s cask.
Just to bring the resourcefulness full circle, the spirit they use to fortify the port is—naturally—their own Moscato brandy.