Visitors to Southern Arizona’s wine country in the mood for something stronger than a rich cabernet are in luck, with one craft distillery in operation and another set to launch by spring.
Elgin Distillery opened in May next door to the Village of Elgin Winery and has already produced about 3,000 gallons of bottled spirits, said owner Gary Reeves.
“We produce whiskeys, brandies, traditional rums. Everything made from local produce,” he said. “People absolutely love it.”
Flying Leap Vineyards, also in Elgin (55 miles southeast of Tucson), will open the town’s second distillery later this year. The new building, under construction, will include a tasting room, barrel house and events space, owners said.
Crafting their own spirits is a natural extension of their passion for local wines, said Marc Moeller, co-owner and winemaker at Flying Leap.
“We’ve got a passion for local Arizona products and one of the vacuums that we have in this state is we don’t really have a lot of choices when it comes to distilled products from local Arizona harvests and crops,” he said.
“Certainly you have companies like Whiskey Del Bac and a few others out there but there’s really not a lot of distilling going on.”
Since 2014, when the Legislature approved a bill that made it easier for micro-distillers by creating a new craft distillers license, only a handful of distilleries have opened in the state.
As of Dec. 30, the Arizona Department of Liquor listed 14 craft distillery licenses in operation, including Tucson’s Hamilton Distillers, which produces Whiskey Del Bac, and The Independent Distillery, which opened downtown in September.
Part of why distilling is not as widespread as some would like is the difficulty involved, said Flying Leap co-owner Mark Beres.
“It took us nine months to secure a federal distiller’s permit and it’s going to take us probably another six months to get a license,” he said. “Then there was the building permit.”
There are also technical considerations when considering larger-scale production, Moeller said.
“You have to put together boiler systems, water cooling systems, reverse osmosis systems, chilling systems, filtering systems … there’s a lot that goes into it,” he said.
When production begins in late May, Flying Leap expects to produce a variety of spirits, including vodka, whiskey, brandy, and grappa, a liquor made from pomace — the grape skins and pulp left over as a byproduct of winemaking.
“Right now the pomace is just added to the compost pile, it’s the saddest thing in the world,” Beres said. “It’s just rich, damp grape skins. It smells incredible and it’s just rich with alcohol.”
Beres envisions a time when a customer tastes a cabernet sauvignon, enjoys it, then walks 30 feet next door to the distillery tasting room and tries the grappa made from the grapes that produced that wine.
“We want to enhance the experience for our customers,” he said.
Winemaker Moeller said the customer experience at the new distillery will be patterned on what they offer at the winery, which includes behind-the-scenes tours and a look at how things are made.
“We really love doing that for folks so they can see it’s not rocket science but there’s a real working together to making a natural, local product,” Moeller said.
When the new distillery opens in May it will sit a little over a mile from the Elgin Distillery, but owner Reeves does not see Flying Leap as competitors.
“They’re going to make vodka; we don’t make vodka. They’re going to make gin; we don’t make gin. The type of brandy they’re going to make is completely different then what we make. It’s not competition,” he said.
For Reeves, visitors to the area come for the variety, and anything that adds to that is welcomed.
“The people are coming out here because there are 13 wineries. The fact that you now have a distillery and in the next four, five months, two distilleries that you can taste at, it makes a huge difference,” he said.
