Carta bianca – Engel Grapefruit Eau de Vie

I do love eau de vies and especially the ones distilled from citrus. My good friend Manuel Engel has some new varieties, and I had to try them! The first on my list is the grapefruit spirit. For a drink I kept it simple for a perfect summer refresher.

Manuel gets his red grapefruits, like his Yuzus and clementines from Valencia in Spain. He macerates the grapefruit peel in neutral grain alcohol and distils them afterwards. In the end, Manuel bottles the citrus eau de vie at an ABV of 42 %.

Typical grapefruit

I might state the obvious here, but the grapefruit eau de vie has a lot of grapefruit notes in the aroma and taste. On top of that, I also found some cloves and orange blossoms in the nose. Furthermore, I tasted vanilla, spices and a touch of tannins on the palate. This all leads towards an extremely long aftertaste. All in all, the Engel Grapefruit shows typical citrus flavours with just a bit of menthol. This way, the spirit definitely can live up to cocktails and highballs.

Wine, spirit and soda

I had the idea to combine the grapefruit eau de vie with a wine aperitif. You could of course, use Lillet Blanc here, but I went for Cocchi Americano instead. Apart from that touch of citrus spirit, I topped the drink off with very cold soda water. I thought that the drink might need a bit of simple syrup, too. Yet, the wine aperitif already brought enough sweetness to the mix.

The simple recipe hides the fact that this is a very tasty highball. It is very refreshing and the wine aperitif works perfectly well with the grapefruit eau de vie. You do not need a lot more than those two ingredients and a splash of soda. Certainly, you can switch out the aperitif as well as the eau de vie and the core recipe would still result in a tasty drink.

*The fact that I received a product reviewed in this article for free, did not – in any way – influence the rating of said product. I received the eau de vie for free from Engel Naturbrennerei.