How One New York Estate Is Reviving America’s Lost Brandy Tradition

The samples arrived a few days before the call. Two bottles wrapped carefully and labeled in the clean, spare style of a producer confident enough to not oversell.

When John Frishkopf, cofounder and chief visionary of Klocke Estate in Hudson, New York, appeared on my screen, he was on vacation, somewhere warm and fighting a cold. Yet, he was visibly delighted to talk about brandy anyway.

I had already opened the Klocke 2000 Unoaked Apple Brandy. I told him what I was getting on the nose: bright apple, green herbaceous lift, a floral thread running underneath. And then, something stopped me cold. 

Vanilla. Caramel. Rich, warm, and entirely out of place. 

This spirit had never seen oak or a barrel. There was nothing between the fruit and the glass but copper and fire.

I asked from where those notes could come. 

“Direct fire,” he said. “The Charentais still uses a high-temperature flame directly under the liquid. You get the Maillard reaction as well as caramelization right in the distillation itself. There are also other reactions occurring: more esters, furfural, hydrolytic reactions. Each produces different notes.”

That kind of precision does not come from a textbook. In this case, it came from a conference room in Prague, a room that Frishkopf still thinks about. 

The boardroom ‘a-ha’ moment that fermented a plan

In the mid-1990s, deep in what he calls his Central and Eastern European years in international finance, Frishkopf sat at one of those long boardroom tables in a beautiful turn-of-the-century building. He was there to advise on how to finance a high-speed rail line between Prague and Berlin. 

Someone brought out large plastic jugs that appeared to hold water. Frishkopf poured a glass and drank. It was not water.

The director of the Czech national railway made plum brandy from his own orchard. Frishkopf understood what it was the moment it reached the back of his throat. With it came the recognition that in Central Europe, distillation was not a specialty or novelty. It was an agricultural fact of life, as practical and routine as to press cider or put up preserves.

The contrast between how deep-rooted that distillation is in Central Europe and its near-total invisibility in America was the seed of everything that Frishkopf would eventually build. 

He loved Cognac, Armagnac, Calvados. He had toured Macallan at 22. He had made wine in his parents’ laundry room from Finger Lakes grape juice he hauled home in five-gallon carboys. 

What Prague gave him was a framework that great spirits begin in the land. The best eau de vie, as he puts it, is about “capturing the essence of the fruit in a point in time.” 

It took him another twenty-odd years to build the place where he could prove it.

The distilled promise of New York’s Hudson Valley

Klocke Estate stretches over 160 acres in Claverack, in New York’s Hudson Valley. It sits on a hillside that carries more history than most people realize. The Dutch traders who settled this region brought the concept of distilled wine to the Americas. 

Kiliaen van Rensselaer, a merchant and director of the Dutch West India Company who controlled vast tracts of the Hudson Valley, wrote back to Holland in 1632 to request a distiller and a still. 

The Dutch had essentially laid the foundation for Cognac trade a century earlier, as they exported hundreds of stills to the Charente region of France. They arrived in the Hudson Valley with the same ambition.

Then came four centuries of interruption. Brandy’s momentum in America was stifled first by phylloxera, and then by the rise of whiskey. Any remaining hope was crushed by Prohibition. By the time the 20th century was done, the foundational idea had been all but erased.

Frishkopf knew the history. He looked at what had been lost. He saw both an opportunity and an obligation.

At Klocke, Frishkopf is not inventing something new. Instead, it’s the continuation of something very old, the reignition of a craft tradition not abandoned by choice, but circumstance.

Klocke’s flagship still is a 2,500-liter, hand-hammered copper Alembic Charentais, parts of which are more than 75 years old. It was imported from Cognac for a reason: the process it runs is ancient and deliberately inefficient, with two distillation runs of 11 hours each. It builds the complex aromatic compounds that mellow into what the great Cognac houses call “rancio.”

The second still, a 500-liter copper pot still from Müller in Germany, was built for an entirely different purpose: the finest eau de vie. Its patented Aromat feature creates repeated contact between the rising vapor and copper, which preserves the delicate aromatics that define the category. 

“Every time it evaporates and percolates back down, it has contact with 10 meters of copper,” says Frishkopf. “That is the concentrated fruitiness you get from eau de vie.”

The two stills are complementary. Each reaches into territory the other cannot touch.

An ode to American brandy terroir and technique

From the Müller still comes Klocke’s growing portfolio of eau de vie: plum, Traminette, and a sour cherry that sold out quickly. 

The Traminette is the unexpected standout, a spirit that Frishkopf likens to a Gewürztraminer grappa. However, it’s more refined and less harsh, made from a grape that most Hudson Valley growers treat as table wine.

Several people told Frishkopf early on that there was no market for eau de vie. 

“I knew we could make a beautiful product, and that making a name for ourselves in that category would help to position Klocke Estate as an elite producer of fine spirits,” he says.

The Müller still also drives Klocke’s brandy-based orange Curaçao, which is easily positioned alongside Grand Marnier and Ferrand Dry Curaçao. It also crafts a vermouth program anchored by a new Bittersweet bottling that’s built for cocktails. 

They are, practically speaking, what keeps the lights on while the barrels sleep.

And the barrels do sleep, in a chai that Frishkopf was determined to build the old way. It’s sunk six feet into the Hudson Valley earth, with straw-bale walls coated in natural hydraulic lime and a dirt floor. The design came from modern American brandy pioneer Dan Farber, founder of Osocalis Distillery in California and a Klocke founding partner. 

“He was building his own chai and said you should do the same,” says Frishkopf. “It was a pain in the ass. But it was right.” 

The temperature stability, the natural humidity, the breathing walls: these are the conditions under which the greatest European brandies have matured for centuries. Replicating them in the Hudson Valley is not nostalgia. It’s devotion.

Future pours of passion and promise

Which brings us to the Referent.

The name was the idea of Brian Crocco, beverage manager at Klocke. Crocco is a Bowdoin English graduate who earned a graduate degree in literature at Columbia. He taught in high school classrooms for years before he ended up on a hillside in Claverack. Crocco found the word while he taught the works of Cormac McCarthy. 

In Blood Meridian and The Road, McCarthy plays with the relationship between a word and the thing it points toward. In linguistics, the referent is the actual object that a word represents. The word “apple” is not an apple, for example. The referent is the apple itself. 

When Crocco explained that framing, it landed immediately for Frishkopf. After all the preparation, the waiting, the years in barrel, the aged apple brandy is not a promise of what the estate will become. It is the thing itself.

The Referent spends two to three years in neutral French oak and reconditioned ex-Cognac barrels, the heads remade with new wood so the spirit receives a measured influence, yet is not overwhelmed by it. 

The bright, green-apple crispness of the unoaked brandy gives way and transforms into apple baked slowly in a crust, raw honeycomb, a warmth that builds and lingers without over-announcing itself.

Guiding the blending is Benjamin Galais, former master blender at Maison Ferrand and now founder and CEO of Ardent Spirit consultancy. He tastes every barrel and assembles each blend on paper before a measurement is made in the lab. 

He sent three-quarters of the first Referent release back into barrel after the initial bottling. What he draws from those barrels next year will be different.

Frishkopf studied the history, built the infrastructure, hired the expertise, and planted the vines and orchards with varieties chosen for what they will become in a glass 20 years from now. He will not be the one who tastes that glass. He knows that, but he is building it anyway. 

“We are setting a foundation that has to be worthy of what will be built on top of it,” says Frishkopf.