The Philadelphia Inquirer - Thursday, October 16, 2003

A maple vodka with its own spirit
Rick Nichols

Barnet, Vt - How Duncan Holaday came to turn milk into vodka and, eventually, channel maple sap from the hills around his spruce-timbered micro-distillery into an even smoother ultra-premium variety is only in small measure a story about the peculiar alchemy of spirits.

The journey begins in 1970s Philadelphia, where Holaday earned his doctorate at Penn - and later lectured at the campus' popular "Monday Night at the Movies" - while his elegant wife, Chin Woon Ping, a poet and performance artist, taught literature at Swarthmore.
He fills me in as we tour the almost-magical distillery, carvings of Indonesian dragons at the entry and an ingenious collection of adapted equipment snaking around the space. The still itself is the fermenter from a beer brewery turned on its head, the cone pointing up.

This is Vermont's rustic Northeast Kingdom, St. Johnsbury just to the north, the Connecticut River Valley and the foothills of New Hampshire's White Mountains a few miles east.

There was no grand design to relocate here, no particular background in spirits. There was only life happening, with all its little victories and odd reversals.

The perfect percentage
Holaday is in tall boots and black jeans, a faded sunflower decorating his T-shirt. It is a good morning. His batch of maple vodka has hit the perfect alcohol percentage on a device called an ebulliometer.

Tall, slope-shouldered French bottles stand empty and at the ready. Outside, Patty Mucha, a local artist, is hand-stenciling gold maple leaves on packing boxes suitable for framing.

By the late '70s, Holaday, whose academic background is in anthropology and Southeast Asian studies, and Chin, who goes by the nom de plume Ping, were Fulbright scholars in Jakarta, Indonesia. Later, they worked in Singapore.

But it was during a return engagement in Philadelphia's academic and arts whirl (the couple lived at 46th and Regent, near Clark Park) that they tossed the cards into the air.

Ping had sequestered herself at a friend's home in New Hampshire to prepare for a poetry reading at the Painted Bride, and sent Holaday and their daughter Rio to look at land.

Sold
A day later, Holaday was signing a check for a rugged 19th-century farmstead near Barnet. The barn's stone foundation would become the base of the distillery he built from a stand of 100-year-old hemlocks.

Holaday lived in a tent for a while. He could have taught eventually, he supposes, or tried his hand at cheese or mustard or syrup.

But he was looking for a less conventional way to live on the land and to take careful advantage of Vermont's greatest natural resources: milk and maple.

Vodka, of course, is most famously made from rye or wheat, potatoes or beets. But any sugar - from rice or barley, or even the lactose from milk or the sucrose from maple sap - that yeast can convert to alcohol (what is essentially beer at first) will do.

The rest is the precision craft of distilling and filtering - in his small operation, Holaday explains, a very careful batch distillation that eliminates impurities, and a very light charcoal filtering that leaves the subtle, sweet note of maple that gives his high-end ($31-a-750-milliliter-bottle) vodka its unique signature.

This premium vodka (unlike his more prosaic "milk" vodka) is best enjoyed chilled and straight, the label advises; it's too good to mix.

At the end of 2000, as Holaday and his crew celebrated the packing of the first shipment of his new line, Vermont Spirits, a cat knocked over a hot still, burning the first distillery to the ground.

It is the second one we are touring now, determinedly completed eight months after the fire. A canopied Chinese bed stands against one wall. Sunlight floods through tall windows. The construction is open and airy, sturdy post-and-beam.

Holaday points out the sap lines that converge from a stand of maples, the boiler we feed with hardwood, and the spring-fed creek that is his water supply. He reduces the sap to sweeten it slightly, but far less than a syrup maker would.

He shows me the table where Mary Dawson, a wry retired nurse, is hand-filling each handsome bottle before sealing it with wax.

About 100 cases a month of this Vermont Gold head to liquor stores throughout New England. A Pennsylvania distributor is considering adding it to his inventory.

It is never, of course, alone on the top-end vodka shelves, crowded as they are with Grey Goose, Ketel One, Belvedere, etc.

But beyond its hint of maple, something sets it apart: It is the product not simply of one distiller's art, but of the intrepid and enduring human spirit.

Contact food columnist Rick Nichols at 215-854-2715 or rnichols@phillynews.com.