completed during the short three- to four-day span when the blossoms peak.”
So, with only a few fleeting days to gather all the elderflowers needed for an entire year’s production, one might reasonably wonder: what method, what technology, do they employ to harvest the elderflower crop? According to the company’s tale, “bohémien” farmers—adorably quaint and wearing berets, no less—handpick the elderflowers. “After gently ushering the wild blooms into sacks and descending the hillside, the man who gathers blossoms for your cocktail will then mount a bicycle and carefully ride the umbels of starry white flowers to the market,” read the marketing material, which included photos of a mustachioed man in a beret, his bicycle loaded down with satchels of white flowers.
Said St-Germain, “You could not write a better story if you were François Truffaut.” Indeed.
Other spirits industry insiders, on the other hand, remained a little more skeptical. When I recounted the St-Germain story to Frank Coleman, a lobbyist for the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, he rolled his eyes and said, “Guys on bikes? Yeah, right.”
Maybe I was still naive, but I sincerely wanted this story to be true, and I asked Cooper if I could meet his “bohémiens” on bicycles. The annual elderflower harvest happens in early May, and I would to be in Europe then, so I offered to drive down from Geneva into the Haute-Savoie region to check out the elderflower harvest.
After some back-and-forth, Cooper flatly rejected the idea. “I will not divulge the name of the town where the elderflowers are grown,” he said. “I want to protect this brand.” And in regards to his secret maceration process, he said, “I’m not going to show you. I’m not going to show anyone. Ever.”
The elderflowers grow on public land, Cooper said, and he worried that a huge multinational liquor company—say, Diageo or Pernod Ricard or Bacardi—would swoop in on the action if it learned the location. I questioned that business model. What if the elderflowers didn’t bloom one year, or what if he lost availability? People in the Alps certainly pick elderflowers and use them in cooking and making drinks. You may even be able to find some kind of elderflower spirit made in someone’s barn. But that’s a long way from supplying fresh elderflowers for a liqueur that’s having an expensive, nationwide U.S. rollout, supported by ads in nearly every food and beverage magazine.
I pressed further. I offered to keep the town anonymous. I told him that I’d visited numerous distilleries and had never once completely figured out secret methods or recipes. Still, Cooper would not budge.
Instead, he offered to send a mysterious-sounding man named “Yves” to meet me at my hotel in Geneva. From there, I would be driven into the Haute-Savoie, to a destination he would not disclose. It all sounded very James Bond. “Are you going to blindfold me or throw a sack over my head, too?” I asked.
Cooper chuckled. “Maybe we should!”
Even then, I would still be forbidden to see St-Germain’s team of guys on bicycles, and he would not show me his production facility. What exactly would he do? It was unclear. “Yves” and I would apparently drive around the mountains, have lunch, and then return to Geneva. I declined.
A few months later, at Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans, Cooper hosted a tasting room for St-Germain. During his PowerPoint presentation, he showed the same photos of the same mustachioed man in a beret, harvesting and stuffing his bicycle basket with elderflowers. During the Q&A segment, as the photos flashed in an endless loop, a woman raised her hand and said, “Is this a true story? Because I am from France, and I have lived in France my whole life, and I have never heard of anything like this.”
Cooper promised that day, and pretty much every time I’ve seen him since, that one day he’ll invite members of the press
So, with only a few fleeting days to gather all the elderflowers needed for an entire year’s production, one might reasonably wonder: what method, what technology, do they employ to harvest the elderflower crop? According to the company’s tale, “bohémien” farmers—adorably quaint and wearing berets, no less—handpick the elderflowers. “After gently ushering the wild blooms into sacks and descending the hillside, the man who gathers blossoms for your cocktail will then mount a bicycle and carefully ride the umbels of starry white flowers to the market,” read the marketing material, which included photos of a mustachioed man in a beret, his bicycle loaded down with satchels of white flowers.
Said St-Germain, “You could not write a better story if you were François Truffaut.” Indeed.
Other spirits industry insiders, on the other hand, remained a little more skeptical. When I recounted the St-Germain story to Frank Coleman, a lobbyist for the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, he rolled his eyes and said, “Guys on bikes? Yeah, right.”
Maybe I was still naive, but I sincerely wanted this story to be true, and I asked Cooper if I could meet his “bohémiens” on bicycles. The annual elderflower harvest happens in early May, and I would to be in Europe then, so I offered to drive down from Geneva into the Haute-Savoie region to check out the elderflower harvest.
After some back-and-forth, Cooper flatly rejected the idea. “I will not divulge the name of the town where the elderflowers are grown,” he said. “I want to protect this brand.” And in regards to his secret maceration process, he said, “I’m not going to show you. I’m not going to show anyone. Ever.”
The elderflowers grow on public land, Cooper said, and he worried that a huge multinational liquor company—say, Diageo or Pernod Ricard or Bacardi—would swoop in on the action if it learned the location. I questioned that business model. What if the elderflowers didn’t bloom one year, or what if he lost availability? People in the Alps certainly pick elderflowers and use them in cooking and making drinks. You may even be able to find some kind of elderflower spirit made in someone’s barn. But that’s a long way from supplying fresh elderflowers for a liqueur that’s having an expensive, nationwide U.S. rollout, supported by ads in nearly every food and beverage magazine.
I pressed further. I offered to keep the town anonymous. I told him that I’d visited numerous distilleries and had never once completely figured out secret methods or recipes. Still, Cooper would not budge.
Instead, he offered to send a mysterious-sounding man named “Yves” to meet me at my hotel in Geneva. From there, I would be driven into the Haute-Savoie, to a destination he would not disclose. It all sounded very James Bond. “Are you going to blindfold me or throw a sack over my head, too?” I asked.
Cooper chuckled. “Maybe we should!”
Even then, I would still be forbidden to see St-Germain’s team of guys on bicycles, and he would not show me his production facility. What exactly would he do? It was unclear. “Yves” and I would apparently drive around the mountains, have lunch, and then return to Geneva. I declined.
A few months later, at Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans, Cooper hosted a tasting room for St-Germain. During his PowerPoint presentation, he showed the same photos of the same mustachioed man in a beret, harvesting and stuffing his bicycle basket with elderflowers. During the Q&A segment, as the photos flashed in an endless loop, a woman raised her hand and said, “Is this a true story? Because I am from France, and I have lived in France my whole life, and I have never heard of anything like this.”
Cooper promised that day, and pretty much every time I’ve seen him since, that one day he’ll invite members of the press
Similar Books
