How One New York Estate Is Reviving America’s Lost Brandy Tradition

Originally published on June 25, 2026 by Food & Wine Magazine

Nearly four centuries after Dutch settlers brought distillation to New York, one producer is reviving a lost tradition rooted in orchards, patience, and place.

The samples arrived a few days before the call. Two bottles wrapped carefully and labeled in the clean, spare style of a producer confident enough to not oversell.

When John Frishkopf, cofounder and chief visionary of Klocke Estate in Hudson, New York, appeared on my screen, he was on vacation, somewhere warm and fighting a cold. Yet, he was visibly delighted to talk about brandy anyway.

I had already opened the Klocke 2000 Unoaked Apple Brandy. I told him what I was getting on the nose: bright apple, green herbaceous lift, a floral thread running underneath. And then, something stopped me cold.

Vanilla. Caramel. Rich, warm, and entirely out of place.

This spirit had never seen oak or a barrel. There was nothing between the fruit and the glass but copper and fire.

I asked from where those notes could come.

“Direct fire,” he said. “The Charentais still uses a high-temperature flame directly under the liquid. You get the Maillard reaction as well as caramelization right in the distillation itself. There are also other reactions occurring: more esters, furfural, hydrolytic reactions. Each produces different notes.”

That kind of precision does not come from a textbook. In this case, it came from a conference room in Prague, a room that Frishkopf still thinks about.

The boardroom ‘a-ha’ moment that fermented a plan

In the mid-1990s, deep in what he calls his Central and Eastern European years in international finance, Frishkopf sat at one of those long boardroom tables in a beautiful turn-of-the-century building. He was there to advise on how to finance a high-speed rail line between Prague and Berlin.

Someone brought out large plastic jugs that appeared to hold water. Frishkopf poured a glass and drank. It was not water.

The director of the Czech national railway made plum brandy from his own orchard. Frishkopf understood what it was the moment it reached the back of his throat. With it came the recognition that in Central Europe, distillation was not a specialty or novelty. It was an agricultural fact of life, as practical and routine as to press cider or put up preserves.

The contrast between how deep-rooted that distillation is in Central Europe and its near-total invisibility in America was the seed of everything that Frishkopf would eventually build.

He loved Cognac, Armagnac, Calvados. He had toured Macallan at 22. He had made wine in his parents’ laundry room from Finger Lakes grape juice he hauled home in five-gallon carboys.

What Prague gave him was a framework that great spirits begin in the land. The best eau de vie, as he puts it, is about “capturing the essence of the fruit in a point in time.”

It took him another twenty-odd years to build the place where he could prove it.