STONE RIDGE- Move over, Maker’s Mark; beat it, Buffalo Trace: A new distillery is taking Hudson Valley whiskey lovers by storm. Since bottling and shipping its first “small-batch,” barely aged bottles a year ago this month, Wiltwyck Spirits® has fast established itself as a force to be reckoned with in the overpriced/underdelivering Hudson Valley liquor market.
The distillery is jointly owned by three young business people aged 25-33 who met in Brooklyn and quickly bonded over a love for fine booze.
“We were working at media startups by day and spending altogether too much money at this cocktail bar by night,” said Sarah Scalise, 27. An idea was born. Using loans from their parents and property owned by partner Jacob Shaw’s uncle, the three decided to quit the big city rat race and put their refined palettes and business acumen to work with their own venture. Wiltwyck Spirits® shipped its first thoroughly unremarkable cases to area bars and liquor stores last February and opened for distillery tastings and tours soon after.
“That’s what we’re really all about,” said Scalise. “We’re not just selling whiskey, we’re selling a story, an experience. Honestly, if we just had to make it on the product alone, we’d be screwed because our stuff is middling at best despite the premium price point.”
We witnessed this in action on a recent Sunday afternoon as Shaw led a tour of eight through the distillery, pausing at each station to speak at length about the painstaking care and attention lavished on each batch by Master Distiller Cody Benjamin, 25, as well as the distillery’s insistence on using locally-sourced, organic, non-GMO ingredients whenever possible. After 90 minutes of learning everything they wanted to know and more about the process of whiskey distillation, every member of the tour bought at least one 375ml, $79 bottle.
“The tour itself cost $12, but it felt somehow rude to not buy a bottle too,” said Peter Manning, a 58-year-old investment banker who splits his time between an elegant SoHo apartment and rustic Wittenberg A-frame. “We ended in the gift shop and after [the Master Distiller] stopped talking all three of them just kind of looked at us expectantly, one of them [Chief Operating Officer Sarah Scalise] standing behind a vintage cash register with an iPad equipped with a Square credit card reader. I felt kind of bad for them.”
Manning said he was there with girlfriend Allyson Benioff, a 37-year-old advertising executive, “just for something to do.”
Scalise said the couple represent a key demographic for Wiltwyck Spirits®.
“We get a lot of weekenders,” she said. “They have money and you can only hike or walk around looking at old buildings so many times. We fit in nicely between the farmers market and dinner reservations.”
Shaw nodded enthusiastically.
“Could you buy a cheaper, better-tasting bottle produced by a big distillery in Kentucky whose economies of scale, huge capital outlays, and world-renowned limestone-filtered spring water result in an all-around superior product? No doubt. But then you’re just a guy sitting at home with a bottle of whiskey produced by the ruthless efficiency of global capitalism. What are you going to do then, drink it alone? That’s sad, but if that’s what you want to do.”
Clearly, whatever they’re doing, it’s working. All three say when they lived in the city, they lived paycheck to paycheck, had high-deductible health insurance they couldn’t afford to use, no appreciable assets, and never travelled or even took more than a day off here and there. That was then. Now, thanks to their distillery, each has been able to embark on a long-planned international trip (in fact, Shaw and Scalise are now in Mazatlán, Mexico while the distillery is closed from Jan. 3-Feb. 20 for “a little well-earned R&R”). Additionally, they’ve been able to acquire late-model cars, homes in Kingston and Hurley, start IRAs for their retirements, and purchase much better health-insurance plans. In fact, Scalise didn’t owe a dime after giving birth last year at Vassar Brothers hospital; a few years ago the idea of being able to afford a house and start a family seemed unimaginable, she recalls.
Theodore Schicklgruber, an economics professor at SUNY New Paltz, offered some insights into the trio’s success. “The gains of the 21st century economy have gone almost entirely to a small slice of the population, much of it involved in finance, software, and as uber-competent upper-level managers in corporations of all kinds. For young Hudson Valley residents to achieve a lifestyle approaching what their parents would have considered merely middle-class, they either need to get in on a job that can’t be outsourced, preferably with a union (working for the county, college, a school district or skilled healthcare work are the best bets here), or find some way to position themselves such that they can provide a local service to the dwindling number of residents with disposable income or the well-heeled tourists. High-margin intoxicants bundled with an activity that can kill an afternoon, located within a day-trip of a major metropolitan area, is ideal for this.”
In the meantime, Wiltwyck Spirits® has big plans for the future. Construction is underway on a brick pizza oven that will serve up $20 pies with gluten-free and dairy-free options available for a modest upcharge (18% gratuity added automatically). A disc-golf course is in the works, as is new outdoor seating. This summer, Master Distiller Cody Benjamin is planning to teach a six-week intensive class on all aspects of craft distilling at a cost of $8000 per student. The distillery has now been in operation long enough that it can offer a product that has been aged for an entire year; that will go to market this fall as “The Legs Diamond Reserve.” The also plan to hire two employees at $20/hour, both of them friends now barely getting by, one as an assistant facilitator at a private school for autistic children and the other as a home-health aide working at a number of different nursing homes on a contract basis.
“Whiskey has been very good to us,” said Benjamin, taking a whiff from a snifter glass etched with the words “KEEP CALM AND DRINK WILTWYCK” before downing the remains, sighing contentedly and surveying the clean, well-lighted interior of the converted buggy-whip factory, now the site of four 500-gallon Vendome copper batch stills, 1000 white-oak barrels aging tomorrow’s product, dozens of branded t-shirts, hoodies, books and other swag; in short, a dream come true.
