St. Urban

St. Urban distillery: drinking in the mountains!

Apple, berries, apricots and other fruits are the ingredients of the alcoholic drink from a distillery based near the beautiful city of Bolzen. Let’s drink something together!

Leimgruber Erwin is a family from Bolzen – a wonderful city surrounded by the mountains in the north-east of Italy. In 2008, the family decided to walk a challenging – and alcoholic – pathway made of precision, chemistry, and taste: the distillation and production of fruit alcohol drinks. They decided to use the huge and amazing heritage of the fruit production of their region – Trentino Alto Adige – to put the knowhow of this land and this territory into the cultivation of apples, cherries, berries and other treasures in a bottle of distillate.

At 830 metres altitude in the Isarco Valley, the Leimgruber family cultivate fruits exploiting the particular microclimate of this area – cold nights and warm days – to get sweet and mature fruits, perfect and excellent items with which to begin the production of distillate.

They create a trademark, the St. Urban distillery, to sell a really good selection of different products that we suggest you taste but…. responsibly!

Let’s start talking about the fruit distillates. Apple, apricot, and berry brandy – even made in barrels – are the fruity and iconic products of St. Urban; we can say this is their business card. As they began to head into the creation of different alcohol drinks, so we have a different kind of grappa made by the Cornaiano’s vineyards output (Cornaiano is a famous village known for its high quality of wines).

There are also curious and interesting products like the beer brandy, gin, and whisky.

The first is interesting because, gulp by gulp, you can drink a product that tastes of fields and barley with a strong alcoholic taste. The second one – the gin – is a nice drink with strong flavours of Mediterranean citrus fruits balanced with the balsamic power of a good juniper berry; it’s perfect with a Thomas Henry tonic water. Last but not the least is the whisky; a good expression of the south Tirol single malt knowhow, it’s an exercise in the style of a master distiller.

If you like their products, you must make time for a guided tour of the St. Urban distillery. From April to November, the distillery in fact is open for guided tours and tastings. It’s really pleasing to learn how a product is created, it’s the best way savour their products and to appreciate what there is in the bottle.

As you can see by reading the articles of Kaataa, increasingly the focus of our stories, the care we put in analysing the producers of food and beverage delivers new ideas, we track and underline new trends; first in Europe, but also today all over the world a typical product is linked more and more to its territory. But, and here you need to pay special attention, the link with the territory is first of all made by the selection of the raw materials and not with the tradition of the product. For example, the whisky is a typical product of Scotland and Ireland but now, in Bolzen, here you have nice producers like St. Urban that distils good whisky with excellent attention paid to the raw materials. It’s the same story for the gin; a faraway tradition with km zero ingredients. Is this a new trend?