Brandy and Eau de Vie Are Seriously Uncool — Unless You’re a Bartender

In early March, Draga Culic, founder and CEO of Blacklisted Brandy, attended an International Women’s Day pop-up spotlighting female-founded brands in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. In addition to sampling sips of her Serbian rakija, or fruit brandy, she poured a bespoke Pear Martini with her pear brandy, honey syrup, and fresh grapefruit and lemon juices, modestly rimmed with pink salt.

“That cocktail was, like, viral in the room,” Culic recalls. “People kept coming up to me saying, ‘I’ve been hearing something about a Pear Martini,’ and ‘Do you just sell these?’ By people’s reactions alone, I know I’ve got something here. This should be the next ‘it’ Martini.”

This beguilingly tart-sweet Martini has become Culic’s secret weapon for turning consumers onto the potential of fruit brandy, which, when they sip on its own, they tend to confuse with flavored vodka. That’s why she built her brand of artisanal plum, apricot, pear, and quince brandies around inclusion in cocktails rather than as a standalone sipper.

Rakija, brandy, schnapps, eau de vie — whatever one calls it — is a historically tough sell among American consumers. In 2023, a year that saw U.S. alcohol sales decline 3 percent overall, the brandy category was among the worst performers, down 10 percent, according to U.K.-based data provider IWSR. Interestingly, though Cognac and aged domestic brandies have traditionally picked up the slack for the broader category, Cognac sales fell more dramatically than other brandies that year, down 17 percent. The category was on track to stay relatively flat in 2024, with spirits growth coming mostly from agave.

At best, brandy represents a confusing offshoot of wine and, at worst, a hopelessly uncool catchall for the fiery schnapps and candy-sweet liqueurs that collect dust on the bottom shelf of the liquor store.

That is, unless you’re a bartender.

Indeed, the good stuff — distilled from peak, fermented fruit juice, pulp, or winemaking byproducts — has quietly populated the backbar at Death & Co. for almost two decades, ever since co-founder Dave Kaplan returned from a trip to Oregon during the nascent days of the bar, toting several bottles of Clear Creek Distillery’s unaged brandy, “which he wouldn’t shut up about,” laughs co-founder Alex Day. To this day, every Death & Co. freezer always stocks at least one bottle of pear brandy.

Lately, eaux de vie are cropping up on cocktail menus at hotspots like Bar Snack in New York (in a puckering, salad-inspired Negroni co-starring nectarine and basil eau de vie) and The Snug in San Francisco, where a private barrel Sazerac features apple brandy, sage, Opal apples, Demerara, Peychauds and aromatic bitters, and absinthe. At Wicked Rabbit in Omaha, Neb., the Seabreeze gets a glow-up via a split vodka and apricot brandy base, then is seasoned with grenadine and lemon. In Chicago, Culic’s quince eau de vie joins carrot-infused mezcal, celery root liqueur, Gentian aperitif, and dry vermouth in an earthy Farm Stand Negroni at all-day bar Truce. A few miles southeast, at new-look throwback Gus’ Sip & Dip, beverage director Kevin Beary counts on “loads of raspberry from a small measure” of raspberry brandy to supercharge the bar’s frothy Clover Club with London dry gin, fresh raspberries, lemon and egg white.

“A distiller is the caretaker of those raw materials. You don’t have anywhere to hide a flaw. All you have is that fruit.”

“If you’re interested in the art of distillation, brandies are a category that is so artisanal and terroir-driven, which is interesting for spirits,” Beary says. “What I’ve had the most success with recently is using brandies to fortify existing flavors.”

In other words, we drinkers who so often overlook fruit brandy might benefit handsomely from a reinforcing measure, base substitution, or sneaky accent of it without even knowing it. Is a nationwide brandy frenzy just over the horizon? Or will it forever fly just under the radar, discreetly capturing the orchard’s bounty at its fleeting peak?

What Is Brandy?

Brandy is made by distilling fermented fruit juice or pulp to yield a strong spirit. Traditionally made from grapes, it also comes from apples (Calvados), pears, apricots, cherries, peaches, and plums. Schnaps (with one p — a.k.a. fruit brandy a.k.a. eau de vie) originated in Germany and is often drunk straight. In North America, schnapps refers to a category of heavily sweetened liqueurs made from neutral grain spirits flavored with fruit syrups or spices to taste (sorta) like apples, peppermint, or root beer — which are generally reserved for mixed drinks.

The unaged aspect of brandies sparks excitement among distillers and spirits community geeks in the same way unaged agave does, says Dave Smith, head distiller and president of St. George Spirits in Alameda, Calif.

“People in our world don’t often have a love affair with añejo,” Smith says. “We’re really focused on unaged, on raw material. That’s what’s exciting and inspiring, and it’s the same idea with eau de vie.”

Whereas the barrel is part of the process with something like whiskey or agave, with fruit brandy there’s nowhere to hide down the line, with oak or other manipulation by human hands. “A distiller is the caretaker of those raw materials,” Smith says. “You don’t have anywhere to hide a flaw. All you have is that fruit.”

At these words, I recall standing in the converted airline hangar in Alameda that houses St. George Spirits in September 2022, amid giant, uncovered bins of just-picked organic Bartlett pears. I sipped an elixir made of an earlier year’s harvest of the same. It was bone-dry, but captured the mildly sweet, fragrant citrus essence of this finicky stone fruit like nothing I’d tasted before. “This is schnapps?” I said.

“What’s so cool about the Martini, which has been in vogue for a while, is it is possible in a drink like that, even in small little adjustments, for people to make it their own. Eaux de vie and these orchard-adjacent spirits provide a great way of playing in that realm, but it still feels like a classic, clean, honest cocktail, because they’re so powerful and so potent.”

Smith and master distiller Lance Winters described the resource-intensive process of making it. The pears are dry-farmed, which drives a lot of the flavor and aroma (floral one year, shinier another). It takes 35 to 40 pounds of pears to make a single 750-milliliter bottle. Fermentation and distillation suck up probably two months of every year at minimum, “but don’t represent that in sales to us,” Smith quipped. Indeed, eau de vie producers must often find other reasons than bottom lines to make this singular liquid. Smith proffers one, quite poetically: “Capturing this moment in time from this orchard and holding onto it as a message in a bottle that will outlive me.”

Bartenders have been swooning over St. George’s latest, basil eau de vie, in which a white wine brandy base is redistilled with Genovese and Thai basil.

“It’s the spirit of summer,” Smith says. Imagine a caprese salad cocktail with tomato water, basil brandy, and a dash of balsamic, garnished with a tiny mozzarella ball; in a subtle, anisey twist on a Gimlet; or as a float atop a Bloody Mary. “Basil is something most people can understand and accept,” Smith says. “There’s a need for those different paint colors as a talented bartender making a cocktail. Basil eau de vie jumps into that space.”

Day wonders if this moment in the modern cocktail era is right for brandy, seeing how the cocktail codex is pulling back from brasher amari and leaning into refinement and austerity, via the enduring and endlessly tweakable Martini.

“What’s so cool about the Martini, which has been in vogue for a while, is it is possible in a drink like that, even in small little adjustments, for people to make it their own,” Day says. “Eaux de vie and these orchard-adjacent spirits provide a great way of playing in that realm, but it still feels like a classic, clean, honest cocktail, because they’re so powerful and so potent. A little pear or apricot eau de vie brings complexity that no other product can.”

“I almost have a harder time selling cocktails with eau de vie than brandy. People in the Midwest know brandy. It’s like when we do cocktails with Scotch whisky, they don’t sell for shit, but if we say ‘blended whiskey,’ they sell great; the same applies to eau de vie.”

One of his favorite cocktails, which Death & Co. christened the Slippery Slope in 2013, joins basil-infused white vermouth and pear brandy, seasoned with lime, simple syrup, and a whisper each of absinthe and salt solution. It drinks like a Daiquiri, he says, but the brandy’s complexity plays tricks on the brain.

What’s in a Name?

There’s still the matter of selling brandy, however.

Culic notes that the price point ($60) is her toughest challenge with bars — though less so in New York City, where an entire cocktail, factoring in all the ingredients including 1.5 ounces of Blacklisted, costs $17, “which in New York is probably on the lower end.” Midwestern bars or those in Florida might push back, which is why she’s targeting distribution in higher-end cocktail bars.

From a customer standpoint, the name itself presents one of the biggest barriers.

“People just don’t know what it is,” Culic says bluntly. “Every time I do a tasting, I sample three clear brandies and one aged, and the first thing people say almost 90 percent of the time is, ‘I didn’t know brandy could be clear.’”

Legally, Culic had to call her product brandy when she got approval for labels by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau. Eau de vie, on the other hand, constitutes little more than a marketing term. For those who peddle the stuff, whether on labels or on menus, the name can break down barriers or alienate, depending on how it’s deployed.

“I almost have a harder time selling cocktails with eau de vie than brandy,” Beary says. “People in the Midwest know brandy. It’s like when we do cocktails with Scotch whisky, they don’t sell for shit, but if we say ‘blended whiskey,’ they sell great; the same applies to eau de vie. I’m of the mindset at this point to make the absolutely best cocktail you can using incredible ingredients. You don’t need to be shouting from the rooftops and forcing education.”

And yet, a higher-concept, ambitious bar might find it useful to call pear brandy “eau de vie” on its menu, “to give an air of mystery in an environment where the guest would ask questions,” Day says.

After all, a bracing and sweet sip of Blacklisted’s Serbian-grown quince brandy doesn’t just express the lemony essence of this notoriously finicky fruit that’s too hard and astringent to eat raw; it holds deep history and lore as the essence of the so-called forbidden fruit dating back to biblical times that also supposedly launched the Trojan War. It feels fitting that this mysterious, hard-to-make spirit should work its way into our collective hearts one sip, one nuanced epiphany, one tall tale at a time.

“As an educator, eau de vie is the greatest tool in my arsenal to get people to understand how an agricultural product is transformed into something totally different but still retains its character,” Day says. “I think that’s magic.”