When they set about opening their beverage-alcohol business in 2017, the founders of Dunrobin Distilleries set themselves some lofty and highly spirited goals.
“Our mantra when we started Dunrobin was to be second to none,” according to co-founder Adrian Spitzer. “We put our heads down and said let’s go head-to-head with whatever are the best whiskies out there.”
It was a heady challenge, so to speak: savoured in more than 150 countries around the world, Canadian whisky is an iconic and unique brand among its Scottish, Irish and American brown-spirit brethren.
Having been distilled as early as the late-1700s in Quebec, Canadian whisky – often called “rye – established itself as a hyper-local agricultural product long before the many small distilleries making spirits were gobbled up by international monoliths like Beam Suntory, Constellation, Diageo, Pernod Ricard and United Distillers.
The right people and the right ingredients
Today, there are over 200 distilleries across the country, including Ontario businesses such as Dunrobin of Vankleek Hill: Spitzer and co-founder Mark Watson – high school friends from The Glebe in Ottawa – sought to correct the imbalance of the international distillers and put the hyper-local back into premium Canadian whisky with their brand.
The earliest of the distillery’s roots were Watson’s 10-acre hobby farm located in Dunrobin, about 35 kilometres from downtown Ottawa; it operated on the premise that with the right people and the right ingredients it could compete in a highly competitive market.
When the quality of those initial ingredients they purchased was questionable, they found better sources, according to Spitzer.
“We decided to grow ingredients in our organic farm environment and buy from neighbouring farms, so we knew what we were dealing with.”
After developing, testing and perfecting recipes, Dunrobin launched a vodka and got it onto the shelves of the LCBO. Since then, they’ve won numerous awards and now sell 21 whiskies, a collection of bitters, some liqueurs and ready-to-drink cocktails such as raspberry-black tea soda and grapefruit and gin.
The lineup also includes an admirable Canuck pun: “Beaver’s Dram” are premium whiskies with either a port or a sherry finish, and as well two double-distilled single malt whiskies which are somewhat rare in the Canadian whisky pantheon.
Whisky flavours are, in part, derived from their storage in wooden bourbon or sherry casks; Dunrobin has a process that reduces that finishing time from 18 or 24 months to 18 days, according to Spitzer.
“It gives us a plethora of opportunities for flavour profiles,” he says.
“Canadians love their Caesars’’
The Dunrobin catalogue also includes a 42%-proof potato vodka with juniper, anise and fennel elements – and which reaches far back into Spitzer’s personal history.
“My grandmother had her own still for distilling water and many years ago a Polish neighbour showed me how ferments convert to alcohol,” says Spitzer who counts their rye, Earl Grey Gin and The Silver Pickle vodka – “Canadians love their Caesars,” he says – as their flagship brands.
A growing international business, Dunrobin has maintained its community presence and their roots in the Ottawa area: they just finished participating in this year’s Winterlude and were selling beverages to skaters on the frosty Rideau Canal Skateway from their kiosk.
“We were serving hot chocolates and whiskies and rums,” he notes. “We had our signature Northern Spike cocktail which is warmed maple sap with tea and rum. It’s a beautiful drink that warms you right up.”
Covid pivot with Beau’s Brewing
Spitzer describes himself as a “serial entrepreneur” and adds that Dunrobin’s success didn’t rely on borrowing large sums of money from banks; rather, they went the investor route.
“We reached out to our network of business owners and seasoned professionals in the area. We got our initial investment from them as our seed money and angel investors. We established operational product development and all-Canadian products going into the market.”
In the spring of 2020, Dunrobin moved their main production into roughly 2,000 sq.-ft. at Beau’s Brewery (now part of Steam Whistle) in Vankleek Hill; in December 2022, they bought the 35,000 sq.-ft. space and quickly found themselves using 90 per cent of that area for their various products.
During Covid-19, they helped Beau’s with thousands of litres of beer – that has a relatively short shelf-life – when the popular brewery had no restaurants to sell to. The ensuing alliance became one of those fortuitous silver-lining moments in a dark-cloud era: like hundreds of other businesses, Dunrobin “pivoted.”
“We had just received a new still made in Amsterdam. It was state-of-the-art, computerized and made of stainless steel instead of copper,” Spitzer says. “Instead of bringing it to Dunrobin, we set up at Beau’s and sucked the alcohol out of the hundreds of litres of beer.”
In 2022, Dunrobin also established a strategic partnership with Swiss distiller Seven Seals Innovation AG.
A pebble dropped in the water
A self-described lover of many varieties of Scotch, whisky and bourbon, Spitzer and the founding members of Dunrobin, impressively, didn’t come out of the beverage-alcohol sector: they essentially pulled themselves up by the distilling bootstraps.
“We put our minds to it, took some courses and met with people in the industry. We acquired the knowledge over time and with practice. It’s kind of like cooking,” he says. “You have a basic recipe, but then you make it your own. When you get into spirits production, you start off with basic recipes and adjust them to your own liking.”
He’s says growth has been like dropping a pebble in the water, perhaps an apt description given the vastness of the $130 billion (CAN) revenue generated by the brown-spirits industry across the globe: Dunrobin has seen sales of their products grow from bottles to cases to pallets to shipping containers sent as far away as Singapore and Japan.
No matter where you drink it, though, Dunrobin spirits focus on taste rather than price and age, according to Spitzer.
“Some people like to add some water. Some people put ice cubes in their whisky. It’s matter of preference. Drink it how you like it. That’s really what we preach.”
Food writer Andrew Coppolino lives in Rockland. He is the author of “Farm to Table” and co-author of “Cooking with Shakespeare.” Follow him on Instagram @andrewcoppolino.
