She is beautiful, she is round. She also looks good in her orange crepe dress, Cinderella alone among her sisters when winter strikes five to midnight in the black fields that white snow will soon play down.
She’s been rolling her hump for generations, barely good at filling pie crusts or celebrating pagan Halloween with her maddened face. Wouldn’t it be necessary to offer him a life of carriage, our pumpkin too often left to its fate in the mud of the fields?
The team at the La Chaufferie distillery, located in the very heart of the municipality of Granby, in the Eastern Townships, took up the challenge by giving a second life, even an ode to life, to this beautiful colorful meadow, raising it to the level of a brandy of astonishing finesse.
The word is out: finesse. Finesse, harmony, purity, but also this credible spirit of barely smoked pumpkin pulp, like these Oaxacan Mezcal from crushed, fermented and distilled agaves to which we could possibly compare it.
It only lacks a touch of depth and length to get there, but, hell, this Catrina titrating 40.4% alcohol by volume is well mastered!
There is of course an alchemist behind the still. As adept at imagining other house distillates – Lemay vodka, London Dry Gin Furlong or Rye Sugar Shack Whiskey – as he is in bringing to life this brand new pumpkin brandy baked on embers called Catrina. The catch is beautiful.
Drafted by one of the many associates (all great lovers of spirits), the mischievous Vincent Van Horne gives the impression of a hobbit drawn from an adventure of the Lord of the Rings who would have willingly dropped the precious ring into its stainless steel fermenting pot or copper stills. Not surprisingly, his eaux-de-vie exude an extra layer of extra magic!
100% Quebec
Van Horne’s journey is an adventure in itself. Studies in ecology, initiation to rum distillation in the Cayman Islands, alternately beer brewer and winemaker in the vineyard, the character is well aware of fermentation and enzymatic subtleties, counting on low productions of higher alcohols, ethyl acetate and isobutanol to gain finesse, subtlety and precision in its eaux-de-vie developed “from material to glass”, as the house credo demands.
Here, traceability is meant to be “100% Quebec” as to the origin of the raw material as well as the know-how that distills the imagination.
Without wanting to play the sorcerer’s apprentice, let’s say for short that this pumpkin brandy (a world first?) Is preceded by a heating on embers which already smokes it to better blacken it before it is stripped of its bark, then crushed, yeasted, fermented and passed in a still (where the heart and the toasting tail are recovered), before staying for a year in small American oak barrels (100 liters).
In my opinion, it will have to be imagined with a few more additional years in the cask, in order to deepen these delicious notes of smoked toast. In the meantime, mixologist Claudia Doyon, attached to La Chaufferie, is already having fun with a proposal of new cocktails based on Catrina. Something like “reborn from the ashes” with the cocktail roundly baptized… Cinderella?