The distillery started making brandy right from the start—pear brandy, grappa, and nocino started in 2013. I came on in 2016, working my way up to lead distiller. Then, in 2019, I became the head distiller.
The main inspiration is from Rick Quinn, the owner of Opolo. He’s of Serbian heritage, and there’s a lot of cultural tie-in. There’s a very large brandy presence in that region: grappa, other eaux de vie such as apricot brandy, cherry brandy, and slivovitz—a Slavic word for plum brandy.
There are a surprising number of Serbians and other Europeans from that region who come through the distillery. They come in and have a heavy accent, and they go, “Oh, you make slivovitz?” And they try it, and it takes them back—it’s nostalgic. You hear a lot of stories about them drinking with their grandpa in the old country. It’s a really cool cultural tie-in. It’s familial.
We’re attached to a winery, so we already have strong wine roots—you have to make good wine to make good brandy. The previous distiller, Paul Quinn—Rick’s son—apprenticed under the renowned master brandy distiller Hubert Germain-Robin. I learned most of what I know through Paul.
The Grapes and the Process
We source Muscat Canelli grapes from our own vineyards as well as a vineyard we pull from in Madera County. We have a long relationship with Jeff Bitter, with Allied Grape Growers in Fresno, and he grows really good grapes.
We distill everything in-house; we don’t bring in any outside product. We’ll do the wine fermentation and fruit processing at our warehouse in Templeton, just south of Paso. We’ll bring in the grapes, de-stem, then press. When we pull the Muscat grapes, we do a soft press for the brandy portion, then a hard press. We ferment all the skins separately, for the grappa portion.
We want to ferment below 70°F (21°C)—ideally, a cool, gentle fermentation at about 65°F (18°C) with a white-wine yeast. This takes about two weeks and comes in at 12 to 14 percent ABV. Then we’ll chill it, so it settles out, pull the juice off, and distill it into a finished brandy—first with a stripping run to about 80 proof, then we’ll distill the low wines a batch at a time to get the finished product.
We have a copper-column, whole-steam still. There are two columns. The big one has about 12 plates, essentially distilling 12 times in one pass. That’s for vodka or neutral brandy; it’s going to strip all those aroma and flavor compounds out, leaving you with neutral spirits. Then there is another column on the still that is separate; it’s not run in tandem. It has a series of four movable plates. We lift and put down the plates, depending on where the brandy is in the run. You start with fewer plates, then kind of chase the run and drop the plates as you go, using sensory analysis and such. It took me a couple years until I was proficient at it.
I make my cuts very, very close. We distill for quality—we’re trying to make something special. The mantra that I kind of live by is that it’s better to have some hearts in your heads than heads in your hearts. Temperature might tell me I’m out of the acetone range, but experience will tell me that I have to wait a bit.
I chill-haze filter the brandy, pretty loosely. I don’t want to remove any flavor, so I don’t drop it super-aggressively in temperature. I take it to just below 40°F (4°C)—just enough to let it haze out a little bit—then run it through loosely.
Using Other Fruits
Our pear brandy is made solely from pears. We bring them in as whole fruit, letting the pears continue to ripen until they’ve reached consumption ripeness. You always want to process fruit—whether it be cherry, pear, apricot, or grapes—at consumption ripeness. That’s what gets you the best brandy. For pears, that takes about a week in our cellar. You know they’re ready because you walk into our 45,000-square-foot (4,200-square-meter) cellar, and it smells like beautiful pears.
We macerate the pears and pump all that pulp and everything else into a tank for fermentation—we basically make pear wine, then distill it from there. Cherries, apricots, and plums—we de-stone those first.
The fig brandy is an infusion with whole figs; it’s a different process. It’s still a fruit brandy, but what separates it is that we use a process called saignée—it’s French for “bleeding.” When Opolo pulls some of the excess juice off of grapes, to concentrate its wines, it’ll result in a more full-bodied wine that is full of character and aromatics. It’s a lot richer.
The caveat is that you’re left with a light juice, pinkish in color. Typically, they can use that to make rosé—or, you can distill it into a vodka-like spirit that comes off really high in proof on our still, about 187 proof. It comes off really clean and lightly sweet, with an undertone of fruitiness to it. It’s a nice, clean base to work with.
The saignée process is very sustainable. Rosé—which is typically made from saignée—is currently experiencing a slump. It feels like just last week I would see T-shirts everywhere that said “Rosé All Day.” Instead of trying to sell the saignée on the bulk market, or more likely just dumping it, we can actually turn it into another product: We make four to five brandy liqueurs from the saignée base.
We’ll proof the distilled saignée down to about 45 percent alcohol—I like to leave a 5 percent buffer. Then, we’ll add whole figs to that brandy and let it steep for three to six months. At that point, the figs are an opaque white because, over time, the brandy has pulled the flavor, color, and aroma out of the fig, as well as some sweetness. We use that same infusion process for our After Dark Chocolate Liqueur, Muddy Waters Coffee Liqueur, and our amaro.
We taste as we go because, depending on the ingredient, it could over-extract, which we don’t want. Chamomile is one of those. Our Chamomile Liqueur is just whole chamomile flowers, steeped in brandy. It has a really nice honey essence to it. Because it’s a plant material, you can extract things like chlorophyll—things that are a bit more vegetal. It’s time-sensitive, and because ingredients are different from year to year, the steep time varies a bit. It could vary by a day or two, so you have to just taste it and see how it’s coming along.
Sourcing Fruit
For a craft distillery, there’s a balance. People often have the expectation that because we’re a craft distillery, everything is super-local, like we’re getting it in town. But to make the product that we make, we need to source the best fruit that we can find because we’re not flavoring it. If we source pears and they’re not very good, we’re not going to have very good brandy. There’s no sugar added, there’s no pear flavor added. So, what comes off the still, that’s how it is.
It’s all about having the best fruit, but then it’s also the cost. And the other thing is volume. When we do pear brandy, we’re pulling about 24 tons of pears for one run, and you can’t get that from our area.
Our pears are currently from Washington. We used to get them from California, but they started to get hard to acquire, and they were getting really expensive. And pears from Washington are fantastic.
The slivovitz is not widely known, but it’s very cultural. The best plum brandy you can make is from Damson plums specifically. You can make it from other plums—California plum, French prune plums, Mirabelle plums—but Damson has a really nice mix of acid and sugar content for fermentation. We can find those only in Michigan. We get both the plums and the cherries from Suttons Bay, Michigan.
Our apricots are local. We use the undersized fruits that don’t make it to stores. They have less water content, so there’s more flavor concentration. It’s perfect for brandy-making because it has more flavor and aroma than the larger fruits. And, because the grocery stores don’t want them, we can also get them for a very good price.
Our fig sources vary. We’ve had some fresh figs from local farmers in the past, but we’ve moved toward dried figs because they’re way more predictable and consistent. We’ve used golden figs from California, and then Turkish figs. The Turkish figs have a nice balance of nuttiness and sweetness—it’s not too jammy.
Brandy in Cocktails, and a Useful Background
The four- and six-year brandies, the VSOP and the XO, they’re great sipping brandies, a little more nuanced. The VS is every bit as good, it’s just younger. I like using the VS in a sidecar.
We make a cinnamon old fashioned—it’s so easy to make and delicious—with just two ingredients: three ounces of VS brandy and about three-quarters to an ounce of cinnamon-infused simple syrup.
I also really like replacing the whiskey in a whiskey sour with fig brandy, then cutting the simple in half because of the natural sweetness from the figs in that brandy.
I was in the Marine Corps and went to Cal Poly, taking communications and sociology. That background helps. This is a hard job. From the outside looking in, it definitely looks very sexy, and there are components of it that are. But it’s a very difficult job. There’s a lot of attention to detail, making sure you’re meeting all the quality standards and holding yourself to that standard.
There’s also an order of operations. You have to plan, sometimes two to four years down the road, to determine what you’re doing now. You can equate this to mission readiness—basically doing rehearsals on missions and preparing yourself for the real thing.
Number one, you’re part of a team—it’s not just you. You have to rely on people to your left and right. Second, the attention to detail and discipline—to really have a plan and keep moving forward with it.
There are always challenges—whether it’s COVID, or glass shortages, or not getting consistent quality of fruit. Whatever the case may be, there’s always something that comes up that you have to roll with and deal with.
In that respect, the military helped me prepare because it was extremely difficult. And now it’s a realization: “Well, I did that, so I can do this.” If I’m experiencing a hurdle, I can get over it because, at the end of the day, it’s not as hard as the Marine Corps.
This article has been edited for length and clarity.