Essence of Macerated Flavours...

NESTLED in the green rolling hills and lush orchard groves of southern France, not far from the Bordeaux region, is the rustic 16th century village of Collonges-la-Rouge: Home to flavour expert Elie-Arnaud Denoix, heir to a 200-year-old family tradition of flavour artistry. Since 1839, the Denoix family has been creating liqueurs and aperitifs using fresh herbs, spices and fruit infusions made from a unique proprietary process of maceration in order to capture the purest natural flavours.

Maceration is the means whereby oils are extracted from flower petals or fruit peels to create distinctively flavoured beverages. Belvedere’s decision to introduce luxury flavours was faithful to their best traditions of innovation and refinement. And so, when set about creating two new flavoured vodkas, Belvedere sought out one man to whom to entrust the project, Elie-Arnaud Denoix.

Elie-Arnaud spent two years of gathering fruits from around the world and testing their qualities and resistance to distillation and maceration. He went so far as to create an ‘alphabet’, in which each letter represented a type of distillation, with its own sub-categories signified numerically. Of these, two samples stand out, representing as they do the luxury macerated flavours of citrus and orange.

These are Belvedere Cytrus or Q11 (made from an infusion of lemon and lime peels) and Belvedere Pomarańcza or P42 (derived from an infusion of orange, mandarin, lime peels and orange blossom). Because Belvedere and Denoix use the finest ingredients, Belvedere vodka spirit and real fruit peels, Cytrus and Pomarańcza have deep and complex flavour notes that unfold as they are savoured.