That’s the SPIRIT
A schnapps tasting tour through the Black Forest is as diverse as it is delicious
Oberkirch is a small village of about 20,000 people in Renchtal, a region on the western edge of Germany’s Black Forest. Like many other villages nearby, people visit here for world-class restaurants, centuries-old town centres and hiking. Oberkirch’s hiking is a little different, though. Here is where you’ll find the Oberkircher Brennersteig. Walk this nearly 15-kilometre loop through a lush green landscape and you will pass eight distilleries, intimate family-run operations producing small batches of schnapps from seasonal fruits — Mirabelle plums, cherries, raspberries, strawberries, pears.
Many distilleries are located in modest buildings, the kind of timber homes often associated with Germany. You can tell which ones are distilleries, though, because there are bottles of schnapps outside along the path. Some distilleries keep bottles of their products in little wooden boxes known as “birdhouses.” Some have them in “schnapps fountains.”
When I first learned about this, my imagination ran wild with visions of limestone angels spewing forth the local spirit. It’s actually a bit more discreet than that but nonetheless amazing. The “fountains” resemble stone tubs filled with chilly water that cools bottles of schnapps. There’s typically a tray of clean glasses and a tray for used ones. Drop a few euros in a box, pour yourself a taste, enjoy and off you go.
The Familie Halter distillery, however, presents a more involved experience. On a perfect afternoon in August, I met Johannes Halter, a fifth-generation distiller with boyish good looks and a New York City T-shirt. He learned the art from his father, who lives in a house beside the distillery. The fruits of Halter’s labour sit in wooden boxes that open at the top. Each is nailed to a wooden post, and they’re lined up in succession along the pathway: peach, cherry, raspberry. Halter poured me a taste of his Zibartenwild, a plum variety. It was rich with a round fruit flavour that arrived like an aria and vanished quickly, leaving no trace of the alcoholic burn often associated with the grain-alcohol-and-fruit-flavouring concoctions that are labelled “schnapps” in America.
About a kilometre walk south is Waldhotel Grüner Baum, a sweeping hotel with floor-to-ceiling windows. At the end of a wide driveway is a cottage-like building where Johannes Müller-herold runs the tiny Distillery Grüner Baum. The small wooden box affixed to the building like a mailbox assured me I was in the right place. I lifted the lid and, sure enough, schnapps.
The distillery has been in Müller-herold’s family for 10 generations. A soft-spoken adventure-seeker in the Hemingway mould, he returned to Oberkirch 11 years ago after living in Hamburg, Switzerland and New Zealand with his family.
Little surprise, then, that although he produces traditional schnapps like his father did, he’s more keen to concoct “mouth-rocking ” flavours, territory he veers off in with his liqueurs. Sitting in his shop, he poured a taste of his elderberry-chocolate-chili liqueur, a luscious sip of intense cacao with a fruity tang. It delivered a delayed kick. My eyes widened; he nodded approvingly.
Schnapps, or fruit brandy, has long been deeply woven into this region, located in the state of Baden-württemberg. The climate that’s made parts of the Black Forest well known for its wines also provides ideal growing conditions for cherries, plums, apples and more.
When the fruit is mashed, fermented and distilled at peak ripeness, a distiller can capture its fresh essence — an opulent flavour without sweetness. There are 14,000 distillery licences throughout the Black Forest, 796 of them in Oberkirch.
Most are bare-bones setups in people’s homes. A German law grants a production licence to any property that grows fruit. There are also bigger commercial producers. One of the bigger ones, Franz Fies, was established in 1948 and is run by Heinz-peter Fies, son of the founders. In 2017 he opened a huge, sleek production facility that can make up to 1.5 million litres of mash annually.
The following morning, a 16 kilometre drive took me along the western slope of the Black Forest to Sasbachwalden, a dense collection of heritage-protected half-timbered houses.
At Spinnerhof, a restaurant and inn on a hill outside the town centre, I meet Rudolf Spinner, who has ruddy cheeks and an easy smile. His still is in the back of the restaurant in a dark, stonewalled room that feels like a nook in a medieval castle. Spinnerhof is one of the few locations where you find a distillery in a public restaurant space. At the bar, Spinner gestures to the supremely fragrant raspberry, peach and even hazelnut schnapps laid out before us. “There has to be 150 things that I want to do, never enough time,” he said, pouring me another shot.
One place where schnapps is not an afterthought is in a long yellow building with a pitched roof and burgundy shutters about 15 minutes from Eichstetten, where a bus from Sasbachwalden delivered me in 90 minutes. Baumgartner is in Kaiserstuhl, a famed Rhine Valley wine region bordered by France and Switzerland.
Fridolin Baumgartner grew up here. His father, a carpenter, owned vineyards and a few fruit orchards, so, in keeping with the German law, he had a licence to distil, although he ran a winery. He died when Baumgartner and his younger brother Ulrich were teenagers. Ulrich is a surgeon and Baumgartner runs the distillery. He married his wife, Anneliese, 43 years ago, and they started making schnapps. Today their prize-winning smallbatch marvels are sold in bars and restaurants throughout Germany.
Baumgartner is a jovial bear of a man with a resonant baritone. On the day I visited, he had just received a delivery of ripe plums. He and Anneliese, who does the blending and bottling, would sort through the bounty that afternoon and get rid of any subpar fruit. Only the juiciest are selected to make that mash to be fermented and distilled. But first, to the tasting room. Each sample — raspberry, plum, sour cherry, Williams pear, quince, hazelnut — offered a full harvest season condensed into a moment.
Florian Faude grew up in the Kaiserstuhl and had met Baumgartner
several times. A casual friendship turned into an accidental mentorship. Faude, who had worked in wine, started Faude Feine Braende in an old wine warehouse and released his first fruit brandy in 2006. If Baumgartner’s schnapps are like a classic rock song — energetic, harmonized and familiar — Faude’s are punk, the same instruments played by a radical thinker. Earthy beetroot and cucumber schnapps are among the more eccentric selections.
Mandarin and blood orange are others. He walked me through them when I visited the next day.
“When you smell this, tell me what it makes you think about, what it makes you remember,” he said, slowly breathing in the garden raspberry schnapps in his glass. “The jam your grandmother made? The first raspberry ice cream you’ve ever eaten?”
Yes.
For The Washington Post