Craft Distillery

The range of our brandies and liqueurs will surprise you and give you something to dream about as you enjoy your after-dinner drinks.

Distillery

At Domaine du Bollenberg, we are craft distillers as well as wine growers. We create our brandies in the copper stills passed down from our grandfather. We have passion and a love for our locality, we are always searching for new flavours and new tastes and we are uncompromising on quality, selection and tradition. In tune with nature, we know the secret of time, and we know exactly how long our brandies need to mature.

Every good meal should end with a good schnapps. And in Alsace our cuisine is fine yet our dishes are very hearty.

Distillation is only the crowning part of the process of carefully picking the fruit, removing any flawed ones, and even the tiny stalks of particular berries, such as nanny-berries which give a bitterness to the brandy that a connoisseur’s palate would detect. Into clean barrels, which must always remain full, the precious fruits go to enter a very slow fermentation. We wait until winter, when we distill at our leisure and make use of the stills.

The Know-How

Sleight of hand and experience are key in choosing and keeping the noblest fraction, the “heart” of the distillate. Distillation follows the traditional process of two heatings.

The first heating extracts the crude ethyl alcohol, the “petite eau”, that is, low in alcohol at around 25%; the second heating extracts the “heart” of the liquid by isolating the “head” and the “tail” products, the former being too acrid and the latter being too high in alcohol content.

The work of Time

Next, the brandies mature in the winery amidst the caprices of time, where there can sometimes be great variations in coolness and cold. They age in open cylinders to allow the volatile ester gases to evaporate, and are then carefully sealed. And so, aided by the constant darkness, the time of contemplation begins. The brandy develops and in time gains a delicate, round smoothness, which could qualify as royal given its ability to delight many illustrious palaces/palates (a word-play in French).