Pfau Distillery

Fruit first, before the still

The fruit comes before the bottle in Valentin Latschen’s work as Winemaker at Pfau Distillery in Klagenfurt, Austria. He frames the discipline in plain words: “The quality grows in the garden.” At Pfau Brennerei GmbH, that sentence keeps the bench pointed back toward the basic product, the orchard, and the patience required before a spirit can carry any clarity. Valentin Latschen is Managing Director of the house, and his path sits inside the family farm rather than outside it. Training at Styria gave him a grounding in regional agricultural and distilling traditions; since 1984, he has been betriebsübernehmer of the family farm, with the responsibility that comes from a living inheritance. Since 1987, he has also worked as schnapsbrenner and geschäftsführer of Pfau Brennerei GmbH. Those roles matter because they keep the hand and the oversight in the same person. The maker who decides what the house is also stays close to the material that will become Apple Brandy, Apricot Brandy, Plum Brandy, Williams Pear Brandy, and Apple Brandy In The Barrel.

The garden as production brief

Latschen’s line, “Bring nature into the glass,” reads less like image-making than instruction. It asks the distiller to begin with what the garden gives, then remove anything that clouds the fruit’s aromatic identity. He describes the aim with similar restraint: “I want to make something unique from the basic product that grows in my garden, to capture the essence of nature.” The method published by the house is not a catalogue of equipment, still shape, ferment length, or batch size; the center of gravity is the fruit itself. Apple moves one way through the program, apricot another, plum another, Williams pear another. The barrel expression of apple brandy adds a second register without moving the house away from its first discipline. The work is fruit-driven, but not casual. Schnapsbrennen is a practice of cuts, timing, and restraint, where too much intervention can make origin harder to read. Here, the stated ambition is revealing rather than masking: carry forward the seasonal character, place, and basic aromatic signature of the harvest.

Inside the still house

What can be said of the still house follows from the way Latschen talks about the work. Pfau Distillery is not presented as a stage set around spirits; it is an extension of a farm, a garden, and a family operation held together by repetition. The still house, the warehouse, and the managerial desk all sit within the same discipline when the same maker has long carried both the schnapsbrenner’s task and the geschäftsführer’s responsibility. The texture is agricultural before it is polished: fruit selected for its character, a basic product respected before distillation, a finished spirit judged by whether nature remains legible in the glass. The house received Schnäpse des Jahres in 2013, a recognition that belongs to this distilling practice rather than to a separate address. The close work continues in the named fruit brandies, especially the Williams Pear Brandy.