LCBO Food & Drink Autumn 2015

LOCAL  THE ART OF ARTISANS

THE TORONTO DISTILLERY CO.

JESSE RAZAQPUR AND CHARLES BENOIT www.torontodistillery.ca

Once upon a time, there were two high- school buddies from Ottawa—Charles Benoit and Jesse Razaqpur—who both ended up as lawyers. Razaqpur practices criminal defence law in Toronto; Benoit is a trade lawyer who works a lot in Wash- ington, D.C. Some years ago, he was hired by the American Distillers Institute, “and he came back all fired up with the idea of starting a distillery right here in Toronto,” recalls Razaqpur. “No one had opened a distillery here since 1933 because the laws and the zoning are so arcane and discour- aging. But we’re lawyers. We thought we could figure it out. And we did.”    The distillery they built is petite, to say the least—a single room in Toronto’s Junction neighbourhood filled with bins of various local organic grains, the walls lined with small barrels and demijohns of experiments in progress. There’s only one still—a curious stainless steel hybrid of a mash kettle, pot still and column

still that can be adapted to produce all manner of spirits. Razaqpur wants me to taste them all but we quickly run out of glasses, improvising with an assortment of old jam jars.    There’s a reason all the grains are or- ganic: it means every finished spirit can be precisely traced to the Ontario field where the grain was grown. So we taste the fascinating nuances of flavour varia- tion between 2013 and 2014 winter wheat spirit, not to mention the radical differ- ences between spirits from rye, corn, oats and sugar beet. The last smells strongly of sweet, earthy beets but tastes much more subtle (what a dazzling Caesar it would make!). J.R.’s Gin ( LCBO 417485, $49.50) is another star, powerfully fla- voured with wild Ontario juniper berries and a dozen other botanicals. The com- pany’s total production is tiny— just 3,000 bottles a year—but the quality is hugely impressive.

TASTE GREAT ORGANIC LOCAL GRAINS

Toronto Distillery Ontario Organic Wheat Spirit LCBO 365528, 375 mL, $39.55

WHEN THE SPIRIT MOVES! PERFECT SIPPED NEAT... Unaged, so colourless, this delightful spirit is full of the bouquet of organic Ontario winter wheat with a slight floral edge. One sip reveals a smooth, musuclar body and notes of pepper, fennel and a hint of lemon peel, un- camouflaged by any oak.

124  FOOD & DRI NK AUTUMN 2015