Stirring up Spirits in BC

by Margo Pfeiff

There's a tiger pelt splayed above the blazing fireplace; potted palms are everywhere. The aroma of curry lunches delivered by smartly clad waiters wafts throughout the manly wooden panelling, leather sofas and Oriental rugs of the colonial Bengal Lounge. You're drinking gin, of course.

But there are no rickshaws outside the window and no Beefeater on the bottle. Both the bar and the beverage are home-grown British Columbian - BC gin served in Victoria's iconic Fairmont Empress Hotel.

White wines, red wines, Icewines, fruit wines. Apples morphed into ciders. Hops micro-brewed into beer. For decades, BC has fermented the fruits of the land into top end imbibements and raked in the awards.   

In recent years, boutique BC producers have been pushing the alcoholic envelope even further, entering the spirit world with innovative takes on everything from mead and calvados to eau de vie and gin, even tackling the mysterious absinthe.

Sake, for example, isn't something you would expect to find made in Canada. But that's just what a former liquor merchant named Masa Shiroki has been doing since early 2007 in a garage-sized space amid the jewellers, painters and potters of Granville Island's Railspur Alley. Here, his Artisan SakeMaker Studio is turning out the country's first fresh, premium traditional Japanese rice wine - unfiltered and unpasteurised.

Unlike his counterparts in Japan - where sake is made only in winter - the self-taught sakemaker creates small batches that are hand-pressed and hand-bottled so that he can produce different varieties year round.  This effort corresponds with the seasons, optimizing fresh, delicious, fruit-like aromas and flavours.

Ranging from 14 to 18 per cent alcohol, he makes three basic styles of Junmai (pure-rice) sake. There is a crisp hints-of-pear-melon-and-citrus about the Junmai Nama that is great with seafood and goat cheese. A rustic cloudy, Junmai Nama Nigori is something to sip with spicy food or creamy cheeses and for Junmai Nama Genshu, unblended and from the first pressing, Shiroki recommends a pairing of red meat and blue cheese. Clearly, he doesn't believe sake is an accompaniment for sushi or sashimi alone.

Best of all, each brew works well with his signature citrus dressing and hot sauce made from Kasu, or sake lees - thick rice paste that's left at the end of the sake-making process.  The sakemaker even has plans to expand his Kasu-based creations, allowing him to explore the concept of sustainable products. “There is no waste from sake-making," Shiroki says.   

Another ancient brew from the other side of the planet is mead. The word might fuel visions of sticky-sweet concoctions sipped by Robin Hood and Maid Marian over medieval banquets. After all, it is the fermented honey wine that stoked Roman and Nordic parties in pagan times and gave us the term “honeymoon." But in BC, what may well be the world's original hooch is Olde no longer.

Tugwell Creek near Sooke on Vancouver Island recently released a contemporary Kickass Currant Mead, wildflower honey infused with black currants, doused with yeast and lightly aged in oak. They also make a Wassail Gold, a traditional unfiltered sparkling mead infused with six spices, whose recipe dates back to the late middle ages, and a Solstice Metheglin, which boasts a very hip honey brew blended with ginger and spices.

Not far away on Hornby Island, Middle Mountain Mead is combining ancient and modern techniques to create small lots of premium mead nectar including a dry Green Tea Elixir infused with Sencha and Jasmine teas, BC Ginseng, nettles and ginger. (Tip: heat it like sake or drink it at room temperature with Asian food.)

In the Okanagan, Frank Deiter is upping the spirit ante in Vernon. For years the former forester looked at fallen orchard fruit left to drop and rot on the ground thinking it a terrible waste. He saw potential in all those fallen apples, pears and other discards and decided to learn from a German master distiller. In the fall of 2004 he started up Okanagan Spirits.

Stillmaster Deiter's copper pot stills now produce a roll call of grappas (“recycling" discarded wine-grape skins) and a basket of 24 eaux de vies – fresh fruit brandies –   using Italian prunes, Saskatoon berries, crab apples, poire “Williams", choke berries and more.  He also distils an aged apple brandy in the style of Normandy's Calvados which he Canadianized with the name "Canados." In restaurant kitchens across BC, chefs are pouring Deiter's nectars into Black Forest Cake (Kirsch), Pâté Cognac and Sauce Calvados, a traditional pairing for pork medallions.

Most recently, Deiter has conjured up the only authentic absinthe in Canada. He calls it Taboo and it earned him a silver medal in Austria at the prestigious World Spirits competition. Also just released is his personalized version of the Danish national fire-water he calls Aquavitus, a feisty nip complete with caraway, fennel, coriander, anise, dill and juniper.

Rick Pipes at Merridale Estate Cidery in Vancouver Island's Cowichan Valley has been converting English and French apples into a variety of alcoholic ciders for years. In 2007, Pipes opened his artisanal “Brandihouse" distillery, not a new concept, rather a logical next step in cider, beer or wine production to make the most of everything grown on a farm or orchard. His Calvados-style apple cider brandy called Pomme de Vie is aged in oak barrels. He plans to soon be the first to age some of his brandies in Canadian oak.

And then there's the gin. Victoria Gin is the brainchild of Bryan Murray and Ken Winchester who fell under the lure of that fragrant spirit and waded through government red tape before they could start up the wood-fired copper used to produce small lots of BC's first premium gin.  It was launched in mid-2008 in true colonial style at the Bengal Lounge, logical for a concoction with a young Queen Victoria on the label. Under the skilled hands of distiller Peter Hunt at Victoria Spirits, 10 botanicals are combined including cinnamon, anise, angelica, orange peel and coriander. The eleventh ingredient is kept secret which has created something of a high-profile guessing game among connoisseurs. Whatever it is, it is part of a heady, aromatic melange whose rose petal aroma dominates the usual juniper. It's a drink that is as full-bodied and complex as a fine single-malt whisky.

"This is really old science," says Rick Pipes from Merridale, who alongside Frank Deiter and Ken Winchester, started the B.C. Artisan Distillers Guild - a growing league of like-minded still-masters. "European vintners have been distilling for hundreds of years. In North America, we've just started."

And just to help them along, we'll drink to that.

For more information on BC distillery scene, visit www.HelloBC.com/spirits.  For more on British Columbia's destinations and travel information, call 1-800 HELLO BC® (North America) or visit www.HelloBC.com

Contacts:

The Fairmont Empress: 250-384-8111; www.fairmont.com/empress  

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