Barney Wilczak spent the first part of his career as a conservation photojournalist, building a media library of habitat restoration for botanic gardens around the world, and then, in what he calls his first midlife crisis, walked away from it to convert the lean-to greenhouse of his childhood home in Cirencester into Capreolus Distillery.
In this episode we sit just outside that greenhouse, going deep on what happens when you commit entirely to representing fruit rather than making alcohol: wild fermentation with no cultivated yeast or added enzymes, hand-grading tens of thousands of kilos of fruit a year on a sorting table his father welded together, and cutting away roughly nine times the volume of heads a conventional producer would keep — judged by nose and palate alone, with no meters. We talk through the arithmetic behind that obsession: a thousand kilos of raspberries yielding just eighteen litres of finished spirit, sixty-two kilos of fruit compressed into a single litre of elderberry eau de vie, and a thousand-variety orchard that ended up, improbably, in King Charles's Coronation cake.
We get into what it actually feels like to have thousands of pounds of irreplaceable fruit sitting in a still, twenty seconds from ruin, and the philosophy underneath all of it — why Barney sees his own inadequacy as a producer as the whole point, why tasting notes can miss what actually makes a drink profound, and why art that's built to be consumed rather than preserved on a wall might be the more honest kind.
Along the way we taste through raspberry, apple, quince, damson, blackcurrant and elderberry eau de vie.
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