“I’ve had people burst into tears tasting these – it takes them straight back to a moment in their past.” I have come to visit Barney Wilczak, an unusually soulful spirits producer, at Capreolus Distillery near Cirencester. We are surrounded by stainless-steel vats of his eau-de-vie, the clear, fragrant brandy that he distills from apples, gooseberries, cherries, pears, plums, raspberries, grapes, quince and various other fruits grown within a 35-mile radius of this sunny English hilltop.
I say “distillery”, which might make you imagine something vaguely industrial, but we are in fact in his dad’s garage, while the still itself is in the shed. But the liquids? My goodness. Each 60-litre container represents around 4,000kg of fruit, all picked within a day of ripeness, wild-fermented over months into fruit wine, then triple-distilled to exacting specifications that vary fruit by fruit and batch by batch. Obsessive doesn’t cover it. When Wilczak made his first batch of raspberry eau-de-vie, he reckons he hand-graded 2m raspberries, rejecting any with even the slightest imperfection.
