Jump to content

Westford Hill

Members
  • Posts

    4
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Westford Hill

  1. This may be coming too late for your Resource directory, Jonathan, but I'd like to offer some feedback to your questions. We've produced artisinal fruit brandies exclusively for the past 11 years. In the world of spirits I believe this is an important category because it's made from pure fruit. With the interest in supporting local farms, as well as the awareness of what goes into foods, we emphasize to consumers the origin of these spirits, and the purity of its ingredients. The wide variety of fruits that are used in our brandies is also intriguing to consumers--their assumption is that all wines come from grapes, so brandies must as well. My sense is that consumers don't understand spirits in general: their ingredients, the distillation process, aging, or most of the terms. Because I genuinely believe folks like to understand more about the foods and beverages they enjoy, I think there's a great opportunity to educate folks about what they're drinking. Because the same principles that make for great winemaking carry over to fine brandy production, the story is compelling to discerning consumers. Customers truly appreciate that there is quality and care in the artisanal production of eaux-de-vie and brandies, and especially like to know where the fruit is grown. The aged brandies are more familiar with customers, and the appreciation for small-batch Scotches and Bourbons carries through to an eagerness to try artisan aged brandies. Besides, aged brandies are brown--Americans have a tougher time with the concept of dry,clear brandies. And again, the notion of brandies from a variety of fruits is a new concept for most. There's a challenge with the eaux-de-vie in marketing partly because of the name. One restaurant GM pointed out that folks won't order something they can't pronounce throughout his beverage list because of the fear of looking foolish. We encourage restaurants to overcome that by calling eau-de-vie something consumers won't fear ordering, such as clear brandies from fruit. In our market we've met resistence from restaurants and bars with implementing cocktail usage consistently. Part of that is portion cost of ingredients, I believe. Yet the restaurants who market the artisan nature of our products see great interest and support from their consumers. Another challenge with restaurants is staff training: the constant churn of bartenders, waitstaff and beverage managers makes relationship-building a challenge Distribution for artisan-distilled spirits is a serious challenge. We self-distribute here in our home state of Connecticut, but have distributors in three additional states at this point. Artisan spirits take more work on the part of distributors to understand, and to sell in (at least they think so) because they're not big, nationally-supported marketing names. The volume in any niche product is smaller, and therefore it's difficult to command distributor sales' attention. For this reason, I believe that "fine wine" distributors or divisions are often a better fit for brandy sales because our products more closely align with boutique, small-batch production wineries than mass-produced spirits. Fine wine salespeople understand that the unique details of small producers is what discerning restaurateurs and high-end wine shops are seeking. Retailers have been great supporters, and good shops are always eager to learn more about the products we offer so they can serve their consumers with informed updates about the products they sell.
  2. Although NRA show this spring is not on our radar screen, there are many other high-profile events like this on which I think ADI members could collaborate to make the table fee and the samples poured affordable. Many of these are region-specific, others more national in scope. I encourage us all to post interest in such events to try to get the ball rolling. Perhaps we try to discuss this at the ADI conference in April to determine how logistics might work if we truly represent ADI and the small-batch distillation industry. Margaret Chatey Westford Hill Distillers Ashford, CT
  3. I'd be interested in hearing feedback from artisan distillers about the value of competitions. Which ones are the most respected, do consumers/retailers/restaurateurs value the results? As an industry, should we be concerned about the judges and their understanding about how to evaluate spirits properly?
×
×
  • Create New...