Three men stand outside a Manchester warehouse at dusk in early December. One of them is clad in jeans and an open-collared shirt and a dark blazer. He’s holding a locked metal briefcase containing the men’s signature product: one 750-millileter bottle of Belle Isle Craft Spirits white whiskey.
It is this suave and hard work that has created downtown’s new craft whiskey distillery, expected to open in March. In less than a year, Belle Isle’s first 475 bottles of $29.95, 80-proof moonshine has worked its way into Virginia’s restaurants, clubs, and ABC stores.
Indeed it’s moonshine, but don’t let that fool you. This isn’t backwoods kerosene. Instead it’s smooth like vodka with a whiskey visage. Moonshine also takes only a week to produce, as opposed to several years for aged whiskey, giving the three craft spirits fans and company founders, Alex Wotring, Brian Marks, and Vincent Riggi the ability to get off the ground quickly. Since starting the company in January 2012, they breezed through regulatory and operational hurdles to allow their first product, Belle Isle Moonshine, to be available through special order with Virginia ABC in November.
“We want to do to the moonshine industry what Patron did to the tequila industry,” says Riggi, a 2007 University of Richmond graduate along with Wotring (they played baseball together). “Where tequila was an otherwise dirty spirit with a worm and just suitable for shots, Patron cleaned up the spirit and made it taste good. They made it sexy.”
Their high-end distillery concept took off early last year after the trio finally stopped simply talking about the idea of opening a spirits company and decided to run with it.
“We knew we were on to something, so it was ‘Okay, can we go make this stuff?’” says Belle Isle’s Brian Marks, also the founder of local T-shirt fundraising company Bonfire Funds. “Ultimately, it was about learning the craft.”
And so, as the old joke goes, “research and development” followed. The group traveled to Virginia’s various whiskey distilleries and read up on the art of premium spirits before stumbling upon Koval in Illinois, where the Richmond team created their proprietary mash with help from the Chicago luxury distiller. Belle Isle Moonshine’s smoothness stems from removal of the spirit’s “heads” and “tails,” i.e., the parts that taste like kerosene and give you a wicked hangover, leaving only the whiskey’s “heart,” or its smooth finish. Koval and its copper still—the same type that Belle Isle Craft Spirits has purchased—allowed the company to immediately begin production and start selling in Virginia. The Belle Isle boys plan to start producing locally before the trees spring again.
“I think people can appreciate that we’re not some multimillion dollar company. We’re bootstrapping it, and we have something really special,” Wotring says. “As opposed to waiting another year until we can open our own distillery, [Koval] has allowed us to get out here and see what people think. The reaction’s been great.”
“Our spirit is the next wave, and we’re really excited to see what the mixologists do with it,” says Marks.
Belle Isle Moonshine is available in about 50 watering holes from here to Charlottesville, including Heritage, Southern Railway Taphouse, and Tazza Kitchen in Short Pump. The company plans to make aged whiskeys in barrels at their Manchester distillery, where, in addition to production, they plan to sell their whiskey and teach customers about the history of Belle Isle. Says Marks, “We’re pretty stoked about it.”