A drink with… Ralph Erenzo, Tuthilltown

Ralph Erenzo built Tuthilltown, New York’s first legal distillery since Prohibition, in 2003. Now hailed as a pioneer of US craft distilling, the producer of Hudson whiskey tells Tom Bruce-Gardyne how William Grant came calling to purchase his business.

Ralph Ernzo, founder of Tuthilltown distillery, talks craft distilling with The Spirits Business

How did it all start?

I bought this land in Gardiner, NY, with the aim of starting a climbing centre, but the neighbours created such a storm about having “rowdy travellers” in the town that I looked to other uses for the land instead. I stumbled on a new license that had just been introduced and it lowered the fee from the US$65,000 it had been since Prohibition, to US$1,500 for three years. That’s when it hit me.

Tell us about your first still

I found a website called dangerouslabs.com run by a bunch of crazy engineers from Colorado and along with things like rocket-powered bicycles, they had a homemade tea kettle still. I made one and spent the winter fermenting apple cider in my basement and distilling it on my kitchen stove. It was undrinkable of course, but what I really wanted was to understand what was going on in the still.

When did you first realise you were part of a movement?

We went to a conference of the American Distilling Institute in late 2003 and figured we’d be one of a handful of people interested. When we got there we found there were hundreds of others, and that’s when we realised that this thing was going to take off.

Are the US authorities very supportive of craft distilling?

Yes, especially the State officials, and the Feds because they get a nice, large chunk of excise tax from every bottle sold. They are realising it isn’t just about alcohol, it’s new tax revenue, it’s agricultural marketing in the sense that we’re all required to use New York-grown raw materials, it’s job creation and tourism development.

Are you worried that big distillers will simply hi-jack the “craft” movement?

It has been co-opted to a large degree because producers realise the public is waking up to the craft notion of things in general and not just spirits. But we’re not really concerned about it because consumers know the difference between a bottle of whiskey made in a little farm distillery in the Hudson Valley and one made by Jack Daniel’s.

But one of the big distillers came knocking at the door in 2010?

Yeah, it was totally out of the blue. I was sitting in my office with my bare feet hanging out the window when I got this call from the innovations director at William Grant’s in New York who told me we’d been popping up on their radar on a regular basis. They showed up the next day and wanted to buy the whole business at first. We pointed out that we’d just spent six years of our lives physically building the place from the ground up, so we suggested they just buy the Hudson whiskey brand and we’d continue to make it.

Do you think that was the day craft distilling came of age?

It was a semaphore to both the larger industry and to all the wannabe craft distillers that this was being taken seriously. We were the first craft brand to be picked up by a major house, and that put the industry on notice that this was really happening. And it verified our feelings that it was possible to start from scratch and build up this kind of business in the States.

What spirit would you most like to distil?

The one that’s in our long-range plan and that we’re working on now, is Hudson Valley apple brandy. We’re about to install a Cognac still and we planted 1500 old world cider apple trees which will take four years before we get a decent crop. So it’s an 8-10 year project, and our ultimate goal is to create a regional style of apple brandy.