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An Appletini made with Du Nord Pronounced Apple Liqueur and lemon. Photo by Jim Lundstrom.

To anyone who thinks owning a distillery is a sexy job, Chris Montana has a few true stories for you. It’s a lot of hard work and hard knocks.

Take, for example, the debut product of his Du Nord Social Spirits in Minneapolis. In 2014 he released a vodka from corn grown on his wife’s family farm. They thought they had the perfect name for a locally produced vodka – Du Nord L’etoile Vodka. The state motto of Minnesota. Star of the North. 

Montana recalls the marketing budget for L’etoile Vodka was $600. 

“That was to design the bottles, logo, everything. We were so broke, and we needed people to know that we were local,” he said. “It was kind of our only hope to cut through all of the liquor marketing out there. We chose what we thought was just a slap in the face  – this is a Minnesota product – and we would quickly learn that nobody knows the Minnesota state motto. And as it happens, nobody knows anyone’s state motto.

“I went around to introduce the vodka and people would ask, ‘Well, where does this name come from? Because it’s, you know, it’s French, and what’s that all about?’ And it’s like, ‘Well, it’s our state motto, you know,’ to a bunch of blank stares.

“So, we did our best, but that one wasn’t a hit,” he said. “Although people liked the vodka – we won Best in Class with that vodka – no one could pronounce it. People had no idea what the heck it was, and so they passed it right up and they bought what they walked into the store to buy. So we had to learn that the hard way. And today we have some pretty cool people working in marketing.”

Today it is known as Foundation Vodka. Foundation has many meanings, but in this instance it certainly means the act of founding, as well as the lowest load-bearing part of the business.

Vodka was followed by a bold juniper-forward gin called Providence and Providence Barrelled Gin, Mixed Blood Whiskey (a matchup of bourbon and rye), Caffe Frieda Coffee Liqueur and my new favorite, Pronounced Apple Liqueur.

Well, pardon my French, but ooh la la to the apple liqueur. Yum! The flavors of fall are packed into the bottle. Pour into a snifter and the apple aroma makes you want to dive right in. Apple and cinnamon in a warming spirit roll down the palate with luxurious velvety autumnal flavors.

“The apple was kind of a no-brainer because it’s just a favorite flavor,” Montana said.

From the start the idea was to make products that stand out from the crowd, so the apple liqueur had to be special.

“When it came to the vodka, we wanted a smooth, corn-based vodka that still had some of the flavor of the corn, some vanilla notes and things like that. With the gin, we didn’t want a gin that was just fungible, that would get swallowed up by tonic, which is why we wanted to really lead with juniper. With the apple, we found there wasn’t a lot of real apple, that most of the apple products had no apple at all in them. They were apple flavored, and, you know, bright green, and were just fake,” Montana said.

“If you go to our website, you’ll find there’s a lot of stuff about pie up there, because I like eating pie. As it happens, I’m currently baking two pumpkin pies,” he said. “I like that apple pie flavor, but I don’t like the fake apple flavor, so that was kicking around in the back of our heads pretty much from the beginning. We just didn’t have the capacity or time to push it out. But once we got the cocktail room open, then we had a little bit of breathing room, and I could sit around and tinker with some different apple recipes, and that one, surprisingly, came together relatively quick. It took two years to get the coffee right, but the Apple was about half of a year.”

He was in search of real apple flavor, but also apple flavor that would be up front just as much six months down the road as it is today.

“It took a little bit of work to find the right juice,” he said. “If you’re going to make an apple liqueur, then it’s really all about the juice. And the initial problem was that the juices were so sweet. As we got more into the industry and talked to more people, we started to learn what was going on and that what we really wanted is apples that weren’t as commercially viable anymore. When I was a kid, a McIntosh Apple was very easy to find, and they aren’t now. And Haralson apples were easy to find. Cortland, maybe a little less. But these apples make really good pies. Well, they’ve been replaced by honey crisp and a series of other varieties that are great eating apples, huge, sweet eating apples. Well, I don’t need a sweet apple. I can add sugar. I need the tartness. I need the malic acid, right? I need that baking apple flavor. And those apples, because they’re not as commercially viable, typically get blended into other juices. So if you get apple cider, then it’s mostly the honey crisp that they couldn’t sell for higher dollar, right? The seconds, and then whatever other apples they had. So we had to work with orchards to separate out Haralson, Cortland and McIntosh and not blend those back in and do a special pressing just for us.”

That leads to another of the stories relating to the opening of this story, when he drove to Lake City for apple juice.

“It wrecked my suspension,” he said. “I looked hilarious driving back up to the cities, with thousands of pounds of liquid in the back of my pickup truck, but that was the only way that I could get the juice that we wanted, and that was the big deal, once we had that, then it was just spicing the edges, just to kind of round out the flavor, you know, some cinnamon, some clove, and then a little bit of orange peel. But the thing driving the bus is the apple.”

That attention to detail is not the only thing that sets Pronounced Apple Liqueur apart.

“We wanted our spirit to be able to be the hero in a drink,” Montana said. “”Liqueurs are often in the 15 to 17% alcohol range. Ours is 30% alcohol. And so that way, it can lead the charge. If you add lemon juice to that you basically have an appletini. It doesn’t need to have vodka added to it,  just a little bit of lemon juice. That’s kind of the theory – everything that we make should be good on its own. But if you have it over the rocks and just squeeze a little bit of lemon into it, it just opens the whole thing up, and that tartness makes the sweetness kind of balance out.”

When Montana says “we,” he is referring to wife and DuNord co-founder Shanelle. Starting a distillery was not the first “crazy idea” Montana had, but he said it was the first Shanelle said OK to.

“I think that there were parts of it that spoke more to her background,” he said. “I mean, I nerd out about the science of making booze. It’s not exactly her thing, but this was an opportunity for us to join our backgrounds. I’m a city kid, she’s a country girl, and we would be using grains from her family farm and from other farmers that she knew and grew up with. When we put out our rye whiskey, the guy who grew that rye was at our wedding. So this was unlike some other things that I came up with. This was really something that could, even though it was, you know, my passion project, would still have both of our fingerprints on it.

”There are pictures of my wife and I going into places, we’ve got our infant son strapped to one of our chests in a BabyBjorn, and we’re trying to do tastings and talk to these retailers,” he said. “For some of them, it’s like, ‘OK, well, you’re local, you’re right here,’ and others were willing to take a chance on us because it was this new thing. People gave us a shot, but it’s not enough to just make it. You actually have to go in there and sell it. So we had to physically be in those shops, often with a kid, because we couldn’t afford kid care.”

Find Pronounced Apple-based cocktails like the Nichelle Nichols (add lemon, simple syrup and sparkling wine) at dunordsocialspirits.com/how-to-drink/category/Pronounced+Apple.