Gölles Schnapsbrennerei und Essigmanufaktur AKA When you Discover you Like Vinegar

As a continuation of Ben's birthday celebration, we toured the Gölles Schnapsbrennerei und Essigmanufaktur, or the Gölles Schnapps and Vinegar Distillery.  You know when you enter into an experience with one set of beliefs and afterward you emerge older, wiser, and feeling completely different?  Well, that's what happened!   Who knew I liked vinegar?

Here's Ben amongst the barrels of vinegar.  To start the tour, we came into this storage area, and when we walked through the door, the smell of vinegar reminded me of delicious German potato salad.  Needless to say, I was intrigued.  Ben and I are big fans of German potato salad.  Ben even made a huge batch of it for our wedding, however, our family and friends didn't love it so much, so we had plenty of leftovers for (a) week(s).  Take a guess.  So, in this storage area, we saw the barrels, and we watched a movie about the company and how they manufacture their vinegars.  Ben did a wonderful job of translating for me, and I left anticipating the tasting in the next building.     

The vinegars were separated into three categories: classic, fruit, and balsamic.  In the classic category, there were red and white wine vinegar.  For fruits, there were varieties of raspberry, peach, and tomato.  For the balsamics, there were white (the king of the day), wine, apple, and pear.  We didn't try them all, but the tour guide selected a few from each group, suggested which dishes the vinegars would best pair with, and away we tasted! 

An idea I liked was the spray bottles on the right.  As much as Austrians like vinegar, no, they don't use it as perfume.  It's for flavor-control.  When I have insalata caprese, I don't like the mozzarella drenched in balsamic, so having a little spray bottle of balsamic would alleviate the over-saturation problem.  Although I now know that vinegar is tasty, I still don't want it drenching my food.  Just an idea if you want to get into vinegar!  

The second half of the tour was dedicated to schnapps.  Just as with their vinegar,  Gölles does not use anything artificial to flavor their schnapps.  When they make tomato vinegar, they use tomatoes to produce it.  When they make raspberry schnapps, they use raspberries. There's no flavored syrup here.  This helps to explain why some schnapps is more affordable, while others are astronomically priced.   In another video we watched, we learned that it takes tens of kilos of fruit to make one bottle of schnapps.  The price difference between bulk apples and bulk raspberries, for example, causes the raspberry schnapps to be much more expensive.

So, with all this talk of fruit, you would think that the schnapps would taste like fruit.  Wrong.  A slight hint of fruit could be detected after your throat was set on fire.  I'm sure for schnapps connoisseurs, the Gölles schnapps is very fine, but I didn't care for the clear varieties very much.  The ruby-red raspberry and cherry, on the other hand...   

The schnapps tasting took place in the schnapps cellar, which had an Olde World ambiance that I liked.  Yes, the ambiance was so ancient that there was an extra "e."

 Prost!