In a sea of liquor, liqueurs can often be that overlooked element but they are also one of the most important when it comes to making cocktails. Liqueurs are used to give our cocktails a twist of flavour, and they can be made from anything, range from fruits to herbs and spices, and everything in between. One Australian producer, Marionette Liqueurs believes that it’s not just about the flavour but also where and how liqueurs are produced. Marionette is about creating classic liqueurs with Australian fruit, all designed with the modern bartender in mind.

And we're here today with Nick Tesar from Marionette Liqueurs. Thank you for joining us, Nick.

Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me.

So, with so many people distilling spirits at the moment, what made you think of producing a liqueur or a range of liqueurs?

I guess the starting point was that we saw a gap in the market. There was so much great production in Australia, but no one was doing liqueurs, in a cocktail sense. We also have a passion for local produce and there's so much great local produce in Australia, that is of a world-class nature, that often doesn't see the light of day. And we got excited about this and that's where it all kicked off from.

Now, for those who may not know, can you explain the difference in producing a liqueur to producing a spirit for example?

So, classically a liqueur doesn't even have to be distilled. You take a neutral base spirit and you macerate fruit. I guess the biggest difference between a spirit and a liqueur is sugar. Sugar is a big part of a liqueur. Different parts of the world have different definitions of the amount of sugar that is required to be a liqueur, I believe in Australia it's 100 grams per liter. But that's neither here nor there. The basis is that a liqueur is a sweet spirit, whereas a spirit, in general, is unsweetened and often higher in alcohol.

And for Marionette, do you distil your own base spirit or do you source it outside?

We source the base spirit, it's Manildra spirit, which is a New South Wales spirit refinery. But we, like a lot of classic liqueur productions, we do distil most of our products. In that, we macerate and then we distil the fruit to concentrate the residual alcohol post-maceration to extract more flavour, but also get as much out of the fruit as we possibly can.

There are a number of foreign liqueurs on the market that if people wanted to, they could get their hands on. How important is that to have an Australian?

It's fantastic. It allows us to highlight what the primary producers of Australia are doing. We work directly with local farmers to produce our spirits. So, this morning we were cutting up blood oranges that had come directly from Mildura, they were picked within the last two days and shipped straight down. It allows us to highlight that primary production and tell the story of where things are being produced in Australia and what time of year they're being produced.

So does that mean that you work seasonally? Or at least you need to gather your fruits and produce everything that you're going to produce of that particular fruit at one time of the year?

Absolutely. So we work with farmers to capture the products at the peak of the season. Not necessarily distilling or starting macerations exactly when the season is, but preserving the fruit in a means that can be replicated throughout the year consistently.

Now I know that you have a relationship with a Tasmanian farming family for a lot of your berries, how did that come about?

I was reading an article... Well, first of all, Shaun, my business partner identified that he'd really like to start by making a cassis, he was fascinated by the classic Burgundian style of liqueur and wanted to make our own. So, we were looking for growers of blackcurrants in Australia and I found an article in The Australian newspaper from about five or six years ago, that was highlighting these crops that were being grown in a little town called Westerway and went down the rabbit hole and made a few phone calls, and ended up getting onto Richard, and we've been working with him ever since.

Has it been quite a hunt to find some of the speciality fruits?

Absolutely, absolutely. With the Clark family down in Tasmania, we were lucky enough that I don't think we would have necessarily sought out redcurrants unless they were growing them. Redcurrants being quite a speciality item and quite scarce. We can only produce about 300 bottles a year because of the amount that the Clark family grows. And we're happy with that, it's a kind of a forgotten liqueur if you will. We also have the blackberries coming from the Clark family and in the future, we'll no doubt get raspberries from them. And everything else has been kind of searching out where is the best place in Australia for that fruit to grow.
For the stone fruit, we've got apricots currently and we will have peaches in the not too distant future coming from Goulburn. And we looked up that area because of the history in Australia of the... In the region, the old James Tomkins ads of peaches, mangoes, peaches. But also because my family's got connections there and that's where we knew that the SPC canning factory had shut down and the farmers were doing it pretty tough, trying to move their seconds fruit. So, we went up there and found the Mandavani family and have been working with them since.
And that's kind of the process. Identify what we want to make and what we were looking for. And I guess which fruits or which varieties of that fruit will be best for making what we want to make, and then finding an appropriate farmer to work with. Because we want to establish that relationship so we can be consistent throughout.

It must be nice to actually have that one on one with the people who are producing what you are using.

Oh, it's absolutely fantastic. It's given some very, very proud moments. John drove down to Melbourne to get a case of the apricot brandy to serve at his daughter's christening, to his friends and family, which was very special. And I got a selfie of Richard Clark sitting in Black Pearl one not drinking a drink that had the fruit that he grew in the form of my liqueur. And he was stoked that he'd Googled the bar that I'd told him to go to and it was the 20th best bar in the world, and he was drinking his product. Which is... It's pretty special.

Now you talked about finding farmers in particular areas that grow that particular fruit really well. Do you believe in that case that liqueur can have terroir?

Absolutely and seasonal change. I expected the fruit that we get from one season to another will be marginally different, and we plan to embrace that. We want to make it as consistent as possible in terms of production, but the fruit will have different elements each year. We were actually quite concerned this year about the potential for smoke taint in fruit and haven't seen any yet. Because there were fires coming through Tasmania at the time of harvest and they were quite concerned about smoke taint, the same way you have in wine.
In terms of citrus, there's big differences in the floral notes that come from blood oranges from year to year, the intensity of the bitterness in the Seville oranges. In the Apricot's, we'll see different levels of the marzipan element coming from the kernels as the way the fruit ripens. And we use a sweet and a sour apricot and I imagine that those will change over time, they won't be the exact same in terms of taste every single year and we plan to embrace that. That's the beautiful thing about using a real product.

Does that mean that the way that you produce it needs to change every year to try and get something that is relatively consistent?

Absolutely. We test for alcohol and sugar, and we need to make sure that we adjust the sugar. The fruit will give off different levels of sugar. Also, the dilution that is given off from the fruit will change. So, everything is adjusted based on that to bring it to a consistent platform. But, the production is very similar. It's more of the end adjustment, that's the case. We haven't noticed to great a seasonal change to have to greatly adjust recipes.

Going on the idea of terroir, how do you believe that, let's take the cassis for example, how is it different in its flavour than a French cassis?

The fruit that we use is a variety called white bud blackcurrant, they're quite a thick skin with a resinous little top and that gives us quite a high acid product, which is very classic. But at the same time the thick skins give us more of a tannin structure so that in the process where we use the distillation and keep the cooked water post distillation, it gives us that extra tannin structure to carry through, which is quite different from Burgundian cassis. The other big difference is that we have a lot less sugar. We're not making a crème de cassis, we're making just the cassis. And that allows more of those green grassy bright characters to shine through.

In the flavours that you've chosen, you're replicating European liqueurs, are you at some stage going to start looking at doing native liqueurs? Or do you think that the market isn't ready for that?

Maybe separately to Marionette, but Marionette is about classic cocktail liqueurs working directly with local farmers. And that's the kind of outline that we're doing for ourselves. So, as long as it's a classic cocktail liqueur and we can work directly with an individual farmer, then in theory, we'll have a crack at making it, but more of your native and alternative spirits will be possibly a different project. But, yeah, not under Marionette.

Now you've got six liqueurs at the moment. Do you want to run through each of them and talk about what they are and what their flavours are?

Absolutely. The first one we produced was the cassis. We call it a dry cassis because it's got lower sugar. This is the white bud blackcurrants I was talking about from Tasmania, from the Clark family. We've been chuffed at how it's been received as one best liqueur in Australia for the last two years at the Distilled Spirits Awards. Which is phenomenal because we had no idea what to expect in terms of reception the first year. We moved on to a Curacao after that. Curacao, refers to the bitter orange, classically coming from the island of Curacao.
We work with the Goldup family up in Mildura and source blood, navel and Seville oranges, Seville being the bitter orange in Australia, to produce this liqueur. There's two different distillations, three macerations all combined into French oak for three weeks before being filtered and bottled. We like to make things complicated. After that, we moved on to the apricot brandy liqueur. We source brandy from the St. Agnes distillery in South Australia. The Angove family have been producing spirit there for five generations, a fantastic production family. Making some of the best brandies going round.
We source the apricot's from the Mandavani family in Northern Victoria, in Cobram and we combine a sweet and a sour apricot to produce it, but we also hand crackle off the seeds inside, dry them out and collect the kernels. And use a-

Oh, wow. That'd be a process.

Yeah. Walk around with a some pretty stiff hands for a few months afterwards. And use that as a tincture to add back to the blend before putting that one into French oak as well. We've produced two more liqueurs from the Clark family in Tasmania, we've got a groseille which is redcurrants. Kind of a forgotten cocktail liqueur. It was written about in the Savoy Cocktail Book as more of a sirop-de-groseille and has been replicated in Jenever liqueurs, so Dutch spirit liqueurs. But not really seen on the market anymore.

What did it have a sort of a taste like Ribena?

So, the blackcurrants more Ribena and the redcurrant is more, for me, Christmas. It tastes like your currant jelly or... I used to work in a fruit shop when I was at university and there was a one week period of the year where you get fresh redcurrants, and that was always in that Christmas week. I think that's probably why it tastes like Christmas to me.

No, fair enough. Yeah.

Very bright and a little bit of a sherry-ed element to it as well in terms of the fruit. The mûre, which is blackberries, these are also from the Clark family. We ended up having to boost the level of fruit in that product greatly, just because to get the fruit extraction that we wanted was 50% more fruit than any of the other liqueurs.

Really?

So, it's heaps. I think works out to be just under 400 grams of fruit per bottle, which is-

Okay. That seems a lot.

... a 500 ml bottle. And finally, we've recently released an amaretto as well. The amarettos from almonds from a neighbour of the Goldups up in the Mildura, the Keen family. And it was quite a process to figure out how to produce it because most amarettos you see on the market now are made from essences and apricot kernels, not actually almonds anymore.

Oh, Okay. That's interesting.

We wanted to really highlight those almonds. So, we used the number of different macerations, a touch of muscat in there because we believe everything needs a bit of acid balance. It also adds those tertiary characteristics. We do use the apricot kernels that we preserve from our harvest of apricots from the apricot brandy liqueur and then blend everything together to make a quite cloudy and unique amaretto, it's not like what you expect. A little bit bitter as well with the almond skins in there.

I mean you're talking about the macerations and some of them being put into oak and all of that sort of stuff. What sort of time length are we looking at for doing some of these?

The longest process is the berries and that's about 12 weeks from start to finish to make a liqueur. So, there's a bit of forward planning going on there, which is a new skill for all of us. The others, if you take out the process of capturing the fruit or preserving the fruit, then anywhere from four weeks to 12 weeks. So, it's not an overnight process.

No, no. So, it's going to take a lot longer than doing a gin, for example?

Absolutely. But it also allows us to work with all of the fantastic gin producers who are coming through in Australia, it's quite a boom. Seeing quite a resurgence in the craft spirits market because of this boom in gin.

Now you're talking about collaborating with St. Agnes for the brandy. What other brands have you been collaborating with?

We've done two collaboration products so far. We've done the Fancy Fruit Cup with the gents over at Never Never. They produce some fantastic gin and for their fruit cup, we send them a fair bit of Curacao. That goes into the mix with tea and a spirit tinctures. They've got some pepperberry, extra juniper, cardamom in there as well to be blended to make a classic fruit cup style spirit. For all of your fancy cups over the summer periods, especially for Adelaide with the cricket.
We also made a strawberry gin, a spiced strawberry gin with the folks over at Brogan's Way. Simon and Brogan are doing a fantastic job. They're producing, I think they've got four gins now, which are amazing. Brogan's, I think she's six years younger than me and has a wealth of knowledge and is the distiller. Simon's her father and they make a fantastic team. And we're taking their gin and macerated strawberries. This is all around the time of the needles in strawberries saga.

Oh, for heaven's sake. Yes.

So, we're working with a farmer and they've had to install metal detectors in their packaging lines and all these extra costs. And so much of the strawberries were going and getting dumped as cattle feed or just dumped in compost essentially. It's such a waste. So, we worked to preserve the strawberries after this and all of the seconds ugly fruit that we could. And macerated those or soaked those in the Brogan's gin. We also added a tincture of basil and pepperberry to make this strawberry spiced gin.

That sounds amazing.

The strawberries are also re-distilled after being soaked in the gin. So, you're concentrating all of that flavour to add back again.

So, we've talked about the six that you have. What plans for new ones have you got coming up?

We've got a work in progress, it's not very far off at all, with Orlando Marzo, the current world-class bartender champion from Diageo's International Cocktail Competition. I used to work with him at a restaurant called Lume and we're working on a nocino, it's his classic Italian recipe. with Mick, who's a farmer up in the Yarra Valley with green walnuts and that's currently sitting in an ex-red wine cask maturing. So, that'll be out sometime in the next six or eight weeks.

Okay. Do you want to tell us a little bit more about that?

So, green walnut liqueurs are more of a bitter digestive style. It gives you this incredible sulfurous flavour when you soak it in spirit. So, we've soaked the green walnuts in spirits, but then also added a few native tinctures and other spices to it.

And how would you use it? For example, what flavours would it go with?

Look, I think it's fantastic. Just has this, but also makes a really nice highball adjuster. So, with a touch of whiskey, citrus, really nice in a spritz. It's just that that bitter adjusting element and then if you're having a bit of a nightcap, it works quite well stirred down as an adjuster in more of an old fashioned style cocktail.

What else is on the cards?

Peach. We're not far off finalizing peach trials. I think we should be able to finalize a recipe in the next month and then we'll get started on the first proper batch of that. We'll make a strawberry liqueur as well in the not too distant future, with all of our strawberries being preserved from last season and that will follow on from the peach. And then Shaun keeps telling everyone that we're going to produce 20 in total. I think we'll limit ourselves to maybe three or four new products a year.

Now let's say someone has bought a bottle of the cassis, they're not that amazing at putting cocktails together, but that they've got it, they've brought it home. What should they do with it?

With the cassis, the best thing to do is make a kir. Kirs are a family of cocktails where you're adding a wine or sparkling element to the cassis. Classically it was made with aligoté, which is why I say a wine element, which is a still one from the Burgundian region because it's where it's originally from. We see kir royales as a cassis dosed with sparkling wine now, which is the most common version of the cocktail. My favourite personally is a kir nomand, which is dosing cassis with dry cider. And there's also a trend to sour beers or wheat beers being dosed, which is a kir beer. We recommend one part cassis to five parts sparkling. So, it's 15 mils to 75 mils. Works very well.

Now you've been going for two years now?

Yeah.

Two almost three?

No, just two. I think we released our first product two years ago in October.

And you've mentioned that the cassis has won awards. Has it been what you expected?

I don't think we knew what we were getting ourselves into. We're four friends from hospitality backgrounds, all of us still in hospitality, who set out on this adventure and it's fantastic. It's a great community. It's a lot of hard work and I don't think we understood the entire process when we first started, I don't think we still do. There's so much to learn and so much to progress in terms of getting better, but I think we're doing a pretty good job. It'll be a lot of challenges in the future as we grow to try and be consistent in terms of making sure that we've got all the products we've already got before releasing another one, and making sure we're keeping up with demand in that way.

How difficult has it been to give up the demand?

There's a little bit of a balancing act, but we haven't run out of anything yet. The support from the local hospitality industry has been phenomenal. People really get behind local and it's great to see your friends in bars making drinks with the product that you've been slaving away at. It's incredibly rewarding. It's also a great engagement, so many people care about what their friends are doing and how it's being done, and why the local industry exists. They want to come and see us prepping the fruit, and where it's coming from, and how everything's made. It's a beautiful engagement with the industry.

I was going to ask, how have bartenders reacted to the various liqueurs and which liqueur seems to be the standout?

In terms of pickup from bars, the Curacao. Curacao is one of the most used liqueurs in a bar or orange liqueurs. Orange is called for in a great deal of classic cocktails, be it your sidecar, margarita, white lady. They all call for a classic orange liqueur. Which means it is the highest volume and most used in bars, but in terms of lists, it's been quite varied. The apricot Brandy liqueur has been used in a lot of lists as a cocktail adjuster, especially over the winter months. A little bit more warming.

Are you finding the bartenders are being inspired by the liqueurs that you're making, and creating things especially for them?

Yeah, absolutely. There's been some really phenomenal drinks. There's so much creativity and so much talent in the industry. Lots of young people coming through with so much energy, which is fantastic. The guys up at bar Rochford made one recently, which was a real standout for me. I can't remember what the cocktail was called, but Esteban put the cocktail together with gin and Mandarin and amaretto, and it was delicious. It was a sour style cocktail.
And the guys at Black Pearl have been very supportive and had a number of specials on upstairs in the attic. Really great drinks.

For someone who is making cocktails at home, what sort of cocktails would you recommend for, let's say the Mure?

I think a Bramble is the best cocktail for the Mure. I really like that as a summer cleanser, gin, lemon, sugar, and a drizzle of Blackberry on top. It's quite a way to spend an afternoon.

Who do you see as your ideal consumer?

Anyone who is passionate about what they consume and where it comes from. We believe that we are encouraging local farmers, but also encouraging the best quality that we can in terms of drinks. We believe in drinking a little bit better and a bit less as well. I think that if you can use better ingredients or local ingredients, which are going to no doubt be a bit more expensive, then that will lead to really crafting something that's special for friends, family, whoever you're making it for, yourself, and that time and energy spent to craft that drink makes it special, but also means that maybe you don't need to have as many.

So it becomes quality over quantity.

Absolutely.

Now is there a liqueur that you guys really, really would love to make, but you're worried that they may not be the demand to make it viable?

Absolutely. Sean's adamant that an Advocat is something that we need to do. Advocat being an egg liqueur, vanilla and egg. I believe it's Dutch. I don't think there's going to be very much demand for that. I think that'll be more speciality. I've seen the great success of a few banana liqueurs, and I don't know if we need more, but I'd love to have a crack at that one day.
Being from Queensland. I think the ones that I'd really like to see are apple and pear, but I'm just not sure yet how to do it. That's something for the next couple of years to figure out.

And is a lot of just research? Going through old books and trying to see if you can find recipes?

But also trial and error. You need to fail a lot of times before you get it right. Which is a lot of fun. It's like being back in a science lab at school, and plenty of experimentation and finding out what truly works and how to make that consistent.

Are there any liqueurs that you've found in your research that don't actually exist anymore today, but did exist, but no one's actually managed to-?

Groseille is the closest to that. There's a tiny bit of production, but really it's not being done anymore. The only ones I can find are in Yerneva, and that for us was pretty special to be able to work with the farmer to make that because it's quite unique. There will never be very much demand for it. But that's fine because we can also only make about 300 bottles a year.

When you don't have a reference though, how do you know when you're making it right?

You don't necessarily. But the aim for us is to be true to that local fruit. So if the product that we're making is true to that fruit, and we're happy with the flavour and the profile, and how it mixes, how it stands up in cocktails, then I guess that's right for us.

Traditionally liqueurs tend to come in tall, thin glass bottles. You went completely the other way with a shorter, more open, I would say bottle that is actually quite elegant with a stopper and all of that. What inspired you to choose that?

We wanted a small bottle. We thought that liqueurs will degrade over time, being lower alcohol. We wanted to have that as part of our message, to use it, to not leave it sitting there for a longer period of time because it will perish over time. Especially the lower alcohol berry numbers will oxidize, so they need to be kept in the fridge and they need to be used over the course of three months after opening really. We liked the bottle. It's an off the shelf bottle. It's not a custom bottle. That can be sourced consistently. It's great for batching. So the opportunity to re-use is there. And Lauren, who is one of the four of us, is a fantastic designer and put all the rest of the pieces together, and we trust her implicitly. She's done a fantastic job.

What do you see as the biggest hurdles for the brand?

Growth. Managing growth will be the biggest hurdle. Being able to be consistent while growing product lines, but also keeping up with production of other things. Cashflow over the next few years as we re-invest everything into more fruit and more equipment, and to be able to sustain that growth is going to be a balancing act. Working with the farmers and finding the right farmers for what we do. There's farmers that are going to face pressures to pull out crops that are making less money. The Seville orange is a big one. The reason we found the farmer that we found is because not very many farmers grow those fruit anymore because they don't make as much money as a sweet orange crop.
The same story with the apricots. Working with those farmers to make sure that they're getting enough that they keep producing these styles of fruit that are integral to what we produce.

I imagine that you are available all across Australia in speciality liquor stores.

Absolutely. We are distributed by Vanguard luxury brands now, which is incredibly exciting for us because they've got tremendous reach. And they're all across Australia. We've got local distributors in Tasmania and South Australia separate, but Vanguard is pushing out everywhere else.

And do you have plans to start looking to export?

Yes. We've got to work to satisfy the Australian market properly first. Make sure that we keep up and are consistent there, but at the same time, we've had a few phone calls and a few discussions about sending a few bottles of booze overseas. Should be exciting.

Where did the name come from?

The company that we started is called Captain Bell's, which is a reference to an old poem talking about the jester being the noblest in the courtroom, and that's how we view ourselves in hospitality. A hospitality worker is often the most educated and knowledgeable on the subject matter, being food and drink, but there to make sure that everyone has a really good time, and to curate other's entertainment. And that's how we see ourselves. And in that regard, the marionette is a puppet in the show, and within a cocktail, the liquor is part of the storytelling, the puppet in the show, to tell the overall story. So that's how it tied in.

All right, Nick. Well, look, if people want more information, they can obviously go to your website, which is marionette.com.au. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Thanks for having me.

Cheers.