Innovative Australian spirits producer Starward has launched a new, Australian-first spirit, with its Co-Ferment Grape x Malt Australian Spirit. Starward’s Head Distiller and Blender Carlie Dyer described how this new spirit came about, how it is defining a new category for Australian spirits and how it tastes.
The Co-Ferment has been crafted using freshly-crushed (Cabernet Sauvignon) grape juice and Starward’s signature malted barley wash, which were then co-fermented, distilled and matured in Australian red wine barrels, and Dyer talked The Shout through the process from concept to bottle.
“Before I started at Starward I worked in the wine industry and I started thinking about the concept for Co-Ferment when I started at Starward in 2018,” Dyer said. “Then in early 2019 I got some juice from a winery and I did a small trial run to see how co-fermenting with grape juice and our single malt would look and if it would work.
“Then I distilled it and that spirit was very, very fragrant with lots of red berries, and it had the body of a single malt spirit. Once I showed that to the team, it got approved really quickly, and we put it through our stills that April, so it all happened pretty fast and it was really exciting.”
Co-Ferment is created with equal parts Cabernet Sauvignon and Starward’s wort, as Dyer explained.
“We brewed our regular single malt wort on top of the juice in tank and added our same yeast, fermented it and then distilled it through our pot stills, with all the same parameters that our regular spirit gets made. Then I matured it in red wine casks, with an equal split of French oak and American oak, because at that point we didn’t really know how it was going to interact with wood, but they both had promising characters.
“Then six years later we have blended it, bottled it and now we are releasing it.”
While often producers of any new product can find challenges in making a concept a reality, Dyer said Co-Ferment was actually relatively straightforward.
“It was,” she said, “from its inception it was such a cool product and both elements of grape and barley really complemented each other. There have been fermentations before, with breweries doing hybrid wine-beers and things like that, but no distillation and maturing it like a whisky.”
So is it a whisky? Dyer says “no”, adding: “It’s its own category. It doesn’t have a formal category, it’s just an Australian spirit drink at the moment. But it will be interesting to see if we could make a new category, and who knows if people jump on-board and want to do it too, I think the could be potential there.”
She added: “There was a lot of work put into conveying the story of [Co-Ferment], and getting people to understand the product, because – maybe on paper – the spirit itself could be confusing to grasp. So we did a lot of background, we created a video and content to help people understand what Co-Ferment is straightaway.
“It’s kind of scary producing and releasing something that has never been done before.”
If Co-Ferment proves popular with the Australian public, it is very possible that a number of other distilleries could start producing a similar spirit, especially with so many distilleries located close to wineries and vineyards.
And Dyer also hinted that there may be more Co-Ferment coming especially after all the research that went into creating this first spirit and deciding to go with Cabernet Sauvignon grape juice.
When asked if she could see whether other wine grapes would work in the same way that Cabernet Sauvignon did, Dyer told The Shout: “Yes, definitely.”
She added: “In my R&D trials in the lab before we started with Cabernet, I experimented with a lot of grape varieties like Pinot, Chardy, Muscat and things like that. They all had different characters and were all very interesting. Some were really intense with the 50:50 ratio, but definitely, I think there is a lot of space for experiments like this.”
Important factors in enticing other producers to jump on-board with this new spirit is how it looks, smells and tastes, Dyer talked The Shout through some of Co-Ferments characteristics.
“The nose is quite different [to whisky], it has a lot of grape character there that isn’t just coming from the wine barrel, but from the spirit itself. So it has a brandy-like character on the nose, and yet it also has whisky there too on the palate. You can definitely tell that it’s not either a whisky or a brandy, or wine, it is its own thing, and we’ve had a lot of positive feedback from people who don’t drink whisky, but also from a lot of whisky lovers.
Tasting notes describe an aroma of “blackberries, cinnamon and vanilla”, with a “burst of cabernet flavours on the front palate with flavours of fig, blackcurrant, and vanilla, drawing out to a malty round finish”. The finish is described as “long with flavours of toasted oak, black fruits and chalky tannin”.
In terms of its serve, Dyer said: “I think it looks really good on ice, and it’s great, neat, too. You could play around with it in a cocktail, I think in something like a Manhattan or a Boulevardia could be cool.”
She added: “With Starward we want to bring whisky to the table and we like to get involved with food pairings and things like that. So I am thinking that pairing it food, or cheese, even having it accompanied with a meal is definitely a message that we have always tried to get to bartenders and restaurant owners.
“But Co-Ferment is a really cool story: it’s Melbourne-made and we are pulling together the ancient arts of wine and whisky to create this hybrid, so there is lots of storytelling.”
Starward Co-Ferment Grape x Malt Australian Spirit is available in limited quantities through Starward, but watch this space for future collaborations and development of the new, exciting Australian spirit.