THE SYMPHONIC SOUL OF BOURBON

New Artisan Spirits distillery.

New Artisan Spirits opens a distillery with harmony.

BY DIANA SPECHLER PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOHN SMITH

“I didn’t want to change the nature of the barrel,” says Robert del Grande, biochemist, James Beard Award-winning chef, and co-owner of New Artisan Spirits, the new craft distillery and tasting room off I-35 and Mockingbird. “I just wanted to tune it. This was about tuning the barrel.”

He’s talking about making his new “botanical bourbon.” “It started with gin,” del Grande explains. He and his business partner, former Coca-Cola executive Don Short, started making

Roxor Gin together a decade ago, long before they had their own distillery. “How do you score the gin?” del Grande asks rhetorically.

“You say, ‘I want the piano here, I want the oboes to play over here…’.” He applied the same technique to the new bourbon. “I started adding harmonizers to the barrel,” he says. “Resonances.

Soft, understated things. Rosehips, fenugreek.” The goal was to make a balanced bourbon with real, fresh botanicals, no one ingredient stealing the spotlight—a perfect symphony. The end result is this bourbon finished with twenty barks, roots, leaves, flowers, and nuts. “Even if you’re drinking it on the rocks and it’s diluting,” del Grande says, “it doesn’t fall apart.

The ingredients stay harmonious.” “Real plants make better spirits,” Don Short tells me from across the bar at New Artisan Spirits, where I’m hanging with the whole family: Don; Don’s wife, Ann, who does New Artisan’s marketing; and their 27-year-old son, Will, who runs the tasting room. It’s a chic and dimly lit space that strikes me as the perfect date spot— spirits hand-crafted by a mad-scientist chef, an atmosphere that’s

somehow both sexy and cozy.

Don Short loves plants. When he was young, he dreamed of becoming a horticulturist. “My mother and I rooted our own azaleas,” he tells me. “We had no money. But plants were my heritage. Even now I freak out around azaleas and dogwood trees.” He adds, “This company has a strategy. And it’s plants. I’ll give you a shot of bourbon. I’ll add a Ceylon cinnamon stick. I’ll say, ‘wait five minutes and you’ll have the best fireball kind of shot you’ve ever had.’ Because it’s real. No sugar added.”

The bourbon (no cinnamon stick in mine) has a pleasing maple finish, even though it contains no maple. Del Grande attributes that illusion to the fenugreek, a plant used in first-century A.D. Rome to flavor wine. In small doses, del Grande explains, fenugreek tastes like maple; in heavy doses, it tastes like curry. The maple-flavored bourbon with no maple thrills him: “When I was a kid, I loved maple syrup. My favorite dish was pancakes.” It thrills him for another reason, too: “You see how much your imagination has to do with your sense of taste. Your brain is filling things in.”

In addition to making plant-based spirits, del Grande fashions plant-based syrups. I’m sipping what Short calls a “classic gin and tonic with simple syrup”—carrot, mango, and habanero. Please don’t ask me how quickly I sucked that thing down. After an hour or so, I decide I’d like to submit my application to join the Short family. They’ve lived all over the world (Don speaks Japanese thanks to his time in Japan, where Will was born); they hang out talking about bourbon and Frank Lloyd Wright (their liquor bottles are designed in homage to his architecture) and the power of natural medicine (Don trained at the Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine and is tight with Dr. Michael Murray who wrote The Encyclopedia of Natural Medicine); they spend their downtime in Aspen; and they have all the coolest Dallas friends, including celebrity chef Dean Fearing of Fearing’s; the guys over at Buda Juice, who give the Shorts their citrus peels to use as botanicals; and JM Rizzi, the Dallas-based artist Don met at a bar one night and commissioned to adorn New Artisan’s walls with minimalist wood “portraits” of his family.

“I don’t even want to charge people half the time,” Don Short confides from across the bar once we’re a few drinks deep. “I’m just happy that someone would come in to see us.”

To get back to music, here’s a coda: Ask Robert del Grande for a playlist to accompany the new botanical bourbon and he goes straight to Beethoven’s string quartets. “Mellow and contemplative.” Then he pauses. “You know what?” he says. “Ask Don.”

I ask.

If you’re drinking with friends, Short instructs, go for Fort Worth native Leon Bridges’ latest album. If you’re at a deeply Texas, country-crowd kind of party, try Tyler musician Paul Cauthen, especially his song “Angel” from an album he wrote at the Belmont Hotel in Dallas. If the botanical bourbon is your nightcap at home? Break out your proper turntable and vinyl. Throw on some Chet Baker.

“It’s not a hard rock bourbon,” del Grande says.

But del Grande and Short are absolutely rock ‘n’ roll—innovating in the craft spirits space as a retirement job, distilling together on the weekends, foraging for botanicals all over the world.

“I’m 67,” Short says, “and we’re still hitting it pretty hard.” P

Above, left to right and here: Robert del Grande and Don Short delight in the botanicals for their new bourbon.