Talking Shop with Winemaker and Spirits Supplier Christophe Bakunas

By Roger Kamholz in Food on Aug 9, 2011 6:20PM

The inner workings of the spirits industry seem to escape even the keenest wine enthusiasts and cocktail geeks. What you drink at bars or see on the shelves of your local liquor store is a result of a confluence of numerous forces and players, from dusty and obtuse state laws to influential product distributors to the flow of gobs of marketing dollars. To help us better understand the business, we sat down with Christophe Bakunas, proprietor of Chicago-based Local Wine & Spirits Company, the exclusive supplier of Ransom Wines & Spirits products and other West Coast wines, including a pinot noir called Jigsaw that Bakunas himself helped launch. Ransom is probably best known among us cocktailians for reintroducing a 19th-century style of gin called Old Tom to the newly resurgent American craft-distilling scene. And Local just announced last week that Ransom has also added a vodka to its lineup called Exchange.

"It's a three-tier model," Bakunas says of the booze business. "Local, my company, is called a supplier. Suppliers come in a lot of different forms. Suppliers are producers or importers. So essentially you are, in America, the point business that supplies the product - whether you're producing it, whether you're importing it, whether you're the negociant. All that falls into the supplier category." Suppliers sell down the chain to distributors in each state, for example Wirtz Beverage Illinois. Bakunas's business partner runs a small Illinois distributorship called Cream, which in turn sells Ransom products and the rest of Local's portfolio to bars, retailers and restaurants.

"In Illinois, you're only allowed to own two parallel tiers," he explains. "So we can legally own Local Wine & Spirits and my partners can own Cream, because they're parallel. But none of us could own a restaurant or a retailer, because that would be either jumping a tier and/or crossing this invisible barrier between distributors and retailers and restaurants. And that's pretty standard across the U.S., except in California, where you can own a license to everything" - an anomaly pushed through by the state's large wine lobby. "The painful thing about it is, all of our federal laws that govern alcohol production are pretty slim, and the state laws are very thick and very old. So every state that you go to requires a different set of rules and regulations for compliance about what can be sold."

Formidable state laws can create a tough obstacle to innovative cocktail programs. "Living here in the Midwest, the states that have been easy to get into have been awesome," Bakunas says. "You can walk into Wisconsin, Missouri, Indiana and Iowa and go, 'OK, we've got all these great craft spirits...' That's where you see all these good cocktail programs going - where the spirits laws are easy. You don't see good cocktail programs in Ohio or in Michigan, because the laws don't favor craft distillers."

Bakunas and Ransom's founder, winemaker and distiller, Tad Seestedt, have been longtime friends and collaborators, ever since Bakunas sought out a venue to produce an approachable, 100 percent Oregon pinot noir he had been envisioning that ultimately became Jigsaw. Seestedt had acquired a distillery permit in 1992 but was only utilizing it to dabble in his passion project of grappa making. Bakunas encouraged him to expand his spirits operation. "He made a lot of grappa," Bakunas says. "But there are only, like, four people in America who drink grappa. So the conversation was always like, 'Tad, my kids are never going to go to college on your grappa.' Mind you, this was circa '02, '03, '04, before really much of that craft spirits movement is ticking along like it is today. So it took a number of years - because Tad is stubborn by nature - but we came up with a small, docile spirits program."

Ransom Old Tom Gin was their first venture. Seestedt's friend David Wondrich, the cocktail historian and writer, consulted on the recipe, which drew on 19th-century source material. "They always had a malted base, not exactly like an old-school Holland, but similar," Bakunas says of classic Old Tom gins, which were the rage during America's gilded age of cocktails, during the broad middle of the 1800s. "For efficiency's sake, gin producers in America would buy old, discarded whiskey and bourbon barrels because, if you put yourself in the shoes of a producer circa 1780 to 1820, there was no 1-800-Cisco, 'I need a 55-gallon food safe drum to transport my spirits in.' It didn't happen. You had a glassblower in the county. People had their own handmade growlers, and they would come up to their local store and tap into their Old Tom barrel. Their gin would be plus-or-minus aged in barrels and tubs - that's where it was stored."

To replicate that part-recipe, part-happenstance nature of Old Tom, Ransom starts with a barley whiskey wash, which makes up about a fifth of the overall product. "And then juniper becomes an aspect of the botanicals," Bakunas adds, "but I think the most important thing about Old Tom to remember is this is before column still technology. Pot distillation is softer and more elegant. You get rounder mouth feel and deeper aromatics, just like you would expect out of whiskey or a bourbon producer - it's a deeper aromatic expression, which is why most whiskey makers don't use column stills." After pot-distilling the gin, the product gets aged. Like their 19th-century predecessors, they choose the vessel of most convenience. "Because Tad owns a winery, we take our old barrels from the pinot noir program, scrub them so they're clean, and the Old Tom goes into that barrel for about four months - just enough to add a hint of flavor, extract a little bit of color and mimic, plus or minus, what was happening on the transportation end of Old Tom gin form the early 1800s."

In addition to Old Tom, Ransom makes a so-called American dry-style gin known as Small's, and a young whiskey call Whippersnapper. Exchange, the new Ransom vodka, is copper-pot-distilled from a base of corn and rye neutral spirits and includes water from an Oregon aquifer. Bakunas says Ransom's next big project is another collaboration with Wondrich, an Irish-style whiskey based on a 19th-century recipe. "So sometime, I imagine next year, we'll release that.

"We put together what we think are some pretty accurate historical representations of gin, whiskey and vodka," Bakunas continues. "And it's been really shockingly well received across the country... People in the U.S. in the cocktail scene really want to support American distilleries. It's so cool."