Photo by Dallas Currie
Italian black walnut liqueur next to black walnuts
Black walnuts, outside and inside the bottle
Ever walk through Minnesota’s fragrant forests or blooming meadows and think, That’s the gorgeous world I’d like to drink? Of course, that’s the basic origin story behind famed European liqueurs—anise grows wild throughout the Mediterranean, and so, Pernod. Italian amari rely on the various roots, barks, and seeds of Italian plants. So what’s it going to take to get some of our forests and meadows into our liqueur glasses? Just two locals and a distillery. Brock Berglund, owner of the newest pride of Alexandria, Minnesota—Ida Graves Distillery—is one of those locals. The other is Alan Bergo—former forager for Marvel Bar and Bachelor Farmer. He is currently working on his website, Forager Chef, and writing a forthcoming series of foraging books.
“I always wanted to do a foraged product,” says Berglund. So when Bachelor Farmer shut down, the two put their heads together. What if Bergo could deliver foraged ingredients to Ida Graves and Berglund could turn them into liqueurs? Done.
First, in November, came Ida Graves’s amaro. This local version of the ultra-bitter Italian liqueur features wild meadowsweet blooms, grassy bedstraw for its sweet vanilla character, and purple native wild angelica stem. “Wild angelica just loves the wet valleys and swampy areas of Wisconsin,” says Bergo. “It’s like the soul of gin, with an herbaceous carrot note.”
December will bring a local version of the Italian black walnut liqueur known as nocino. “In June, Alan brought me hundreds of pounds of black walnuts,” Berglund told me. He cut them up, soaked them in alcohol for three months, and just transferred them to a port barrel he got from nearby Carlos Creek Winery. Soon he’ll add honey from his Alexandria property. “It smells like Christmas in that barrel,” he says.
In January they’ll release a liqueur that started back in August when Bergo picked hundreds of pounds of wild plums from the familiar Prunus americana living on the edges of many Minnesota forests. “Some might mistake them for a small crabapple,” explains Bergo. “People think they’re a trash fruit. You pop one in your mouth and think: Bad—so bitter. The smell, though, it’s better than a bouquet of roses, so sweet and intoxicating. It’s like a perfect perfume.” So hundreds of pounds of pitted wild plums, along with their roasted, almond-scented pits, now steep at Ida Graves.
These initial runs will be tiny—each merely a few hundred bottles from a single barrel—but both Bergo and Berglund hope that these experiments are the start of a new era of tasting, knowing, and loving our local natural world.
