the stories spirits tell
One sip of the Magnolia Martini at Cure in New Orleans palate-zaps you to a spring day, the warm air fecund with blossoms. One moment, you’re sipping a cocktail in Chicago; the next, the earthy freshness of baby carrots pulled straight from the soil carries you back to childhood. The sensory memories that transport the drinker also inspired the people who created the spirits. Here are a few of their stories.
Photo courtesy of Wonderbird Spirits
the creator: chand harlow
their position: co-founder and distiller, wonderbird spirits
the spirit: wonderbird spirits gin no. 97 magnolia experimental
“I'm from Mississippi, and my business partners are both from the South: Rob [Forster] is from Louisiana, and Tom [Alexander] is from Texas. Magnolia is something we've all grown up with, and most people in the South associate that smell with their childhood, their life experience. Growing up, my house had two huge magnolias. That was the tree I climbed my entire childhood, and there was a little wooden seat that I installed, about 50 feet up in the tree. As a kiddo, when I decided I wanted to run away, I'd climb up in the tree and sit there, waiting for someone to come. Magnolia is so beautiful we wanted to share it with everybody.
I picked magnolia blossoms and distilled them in a small 500-millilitre lab still, a dry-vapour distillation. The result was killer. We wanted to make a robust Martini gin, so we kept the botanical profile very simple, everything built to highlight that magnolia flavour. It kind of reminds me of baked meringue; it has a sweet, vanilla, floral aspect. We used juniper, coriander, and there was a slight bitterness from the magnolia blossom, a touch of black peppercorn balances that. Cinchona bark gives a nice, earthy spice.
I hand-pick all the blossoms daily when they’re in season, mostly from my yard, and it takes about an hour to pick 40 blossoms a day from a tree that's 100 feet tall.
Our base spirit is made from locally farmed jasmine rice, and we inoculate it with koji that we import from Japan, for 48 hours. We mash it, ferment for seven days, then distill it—it’s very labour intensive. We merged American technique with sake-making. It’s a unique and super silky base spirit, with a little bit of florality from the rice.”
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Wonderbird Spirits began in Taylor, Mississippi, in 2019 as a grain-to-glass distillery. It makes award-winning gins using rice, botanicals and other ingredients grown in the Mississippi Delta.
the creator: thad vogler
their position: owner, bar agricole and author of by the smoke and the smell
the spirit: bar agricole citrus gin trilogy
“In the last couple of years I've started making gin with my distiller/partner in the Central Valley [of California]. I just hadn't seen the gin I want to drink, which would be a truly agricultural spirit. We have been making the only Demeter-certified, single-estate, single-vintage (spirit and botanicals), non-chill-filtered gins in the world.
Gin is about capturing flavours. Usually that means using an industrial grain neutral spirit and dried botanicals with no real provenance. Lance [Winters] at St. George Spirits really moved the needle with his Terroir Gin years ago. I wanted to start with a base” spirit with a sense of place, a grower-producer grape spirit from the farm where we produce our brandy. We wanted to use 100 per cent fresh botanicals, as that would really capture seasonality and provenance. All the botanicals are harvested at peak ripeness throughout the year and are macerated in the biodynamic grape spirit we make within 24 hours. You could call them tisane-style gins.
This year we took it a step further by making a series of citrus gins from our part of [California’s] Central Valley, which is arguably the citrus capital of the world. In Japan, seasonality has guided cuisine and aesthetics for over a thousand years. This limited release of gins honours this idea, harvesting California citrus at three distinct points in the 2024–25 growing season. Each of these gins is a moment in time and a citrus tone poem.
Hashiri Gin is a blend of Meyer lemon, green Washington navel, and Buddha’s Hand citron picked on December 1, which captures the pithy, floral notes of the Early Season. Shun Gin has Meyer lemons, Washington navels, tangerines and mandarins in a lush, complex profile that connotes peak season, January 15. Nagori Gin, made from ruby grapefruit, Persian lime, blood orange, and late Washington navels, captures bittersweet oils, concentrated sugars, and the saturated quality of winter’s last citrus, picked on February 21. We say goodbye to another year.”
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Bar Agricole is a single-origin spirits company bottling deeply evocative grower spirits, along with singular bottlings from other producers. The bricks-and-mortar Bar Agricole opened in 2010 in San Francisco and won the James Beard Award for Outstanding Bar Program in 2019, closing in 2024.
Images clockwise from top left: Fresh carrots destined for Apologue Carrot Root Liqueur; carrots draining after infusion; batch development at Apologue Spirits; and the finished liqueur served in a cocktail. Photos courtesy of Apologue Spirits.
the creator: robert haynes
their position: co-founder, apologue spirits
the spirit: apologue carrot
“Years ago, on a work trip to Mexico City, I popped into [Licoreria] Limantour. I vividly remember being served a wonderful cocktail with pisco, mezcal, and pineapple that was garnished with dehydrated carrots. Inspired, I returned stateside to workshop drinks for an alumni pop-up at The Violet Hour in Chicago, with my buddy Owen. We stumbled upon a Carrot Sherry Cobbler: it was refreshing and savoury while being both approachable and adventurous. The carrot is universally familiar, yet in a cocktail context, it feels unexpected and new.
Over the years, whenever I was asked if we were working on anything new, I’d float the carrot liqueur concept. I found that it really resonated with bar creatives. Carrots are capable of a wide spectrum of flavour and intensity depending on how they are processed. We wanted to show them in all their glory, so we decided to use them three ways: fresh and crisply cut; fresh juice, taking cues from agua frescas; and dried, for a deep, savoury low-end flavour. To complement that base and add complexity, we built a supporting cast of botanicals: cinnamon and ginger for warmth, orange peel and lemon for lift, a touch of mint for cooling aromatics and a little cinchona bark to give it some backbone.
Folks are having fun with it. Apologue Carrot gives bartenders a new way to explore nostalgia, novelty and storytelling, and guests are intrigued. That said, I’m still waiting for someone to perfect the Carrot Cake Shot. If you crack the code, please send it our way!”
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Founded in 2017 by Ziyad Asrar, Robert Haynes and Jordan Teppler, Chicago-based Apologue makes unique craft liqueurs from local, all-natural ingredients. Aronia berry liqueur, Paw Paw and Persimmon fruit liqueurs, and exotic Saffron and Celery Root bottlings punch up cocktails with their vivid colours and flavours.
Images from left to right: Heather Freyer and Chef Elizabeth Falkner, T’Maro Amaro Liqueur, fresh dates used to create T’Maro. Photos courtesy of T’Maro.
the creator: chef elizabeth falkner
their position: co-founder, apologue spirits
the spirit: t’maro date liqueur
“Heather [Freyer, T’Maro co-founder] and I were in Sicily, and I said that I really like amari, but sometimes they're too sweet to counter the bitterness. We have too much sugar in our American diet already. I'm a chef who's always looked at underutilized ingredients, and it's interesting to play with allulose and monk fruit and alternative sweeteners, but what I really like is something that's naturally caramelized by the sun: dates. There are so many different varieties: some of them are fudgy, or taste like honey, and some are creamier, and have a brown sugar or maple note. Sweetening with dates gives a soft, round viscosity.
Amaro is usually made with wine or a neutral spirit based on grain or grapes. We thought, doesn't somebody make date spirit? Nobody here does, though they do in the Middle East. So I figured out how to distill a spirit from dates. It’s a brandy, or eau de vie, but I think about it like the agave plant is to tequila. It's a desert plant, and the dates are already caramelized in the sun, so it's already cooked.
T'Maro’s main flavour is date, and then with the botanicals I want to take you on a trip around California. We have three different kinds of organic citrus, artichoke, wild fennel, licorice and we use bay laurel. I love to cycle on a road near my mom's house that smells like bay laurel mixed with a little bit of pine and eucalyptus, and I look forward to that last stretch on my bike, where I can smell that.
Tamar is an ancient word for date or date palm, and T’Maro actually sounds like tomorrow, right? I wrote some fiction set in a desert-chic community, set in a future-past time. It’s not a masculine world. It's a place I have in my head that’s out in the middle of the desert, but has its own sustainable oasis-type hotel. It’s not anything I've experienced, but when we go to the desert in Coachella to visit the palms, they’re so majestic and otherworldly. They don’t need much water, they don't need pesticides, they dry themselves in the sun—it's an amazing miracle fruit.”
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Los Angeles-based T'Maro is a collaboration between chef Elizabeth Falkner and spirits industry veteran Heather Freyer. The line includes an Eau de Vie distilled from Coachella Valley organic dates, plus date-sweetened T’Maro Amaro and T’Maro Cacao Nib Liqueur.
