For an Englishman to come to Poland and take the Poles on at their own game, a game they have been playing for at least half a millennium, is bold to say the least.
But this is precisely what Londoner William Borrell has done with Vestal Vodka, a brand of super-premium potato vodkas.
The high-quality, unfiltered, natural vodkas have certainly resonated with discerning drinkers around the world, proof of which is that bottles can be found in 28 of the top 50 bars and in the world, and founder Borrell has just sold a 42-percent stake to one of the UK’s largest drinks companies.
His genius idea was to take Polish vodka, a product that he believed was dominated more by fancy packaging and weirdly shaped bottles than by the quality of their contents, and infuse it with the French concept of terroir.
The Eureka moment came ten years ago when Borrell was spending the summer at the hotel lodge that his father runs in Poland’s Kaszuby region with his Polish wife.
Borrell told TFN: “Just like grapes grown in different vineyards that give different styles of wine, potatoes also live in their terroir and are totally defined by the concept of wind, rain, earth and sun.
“So, I thought that it would be interesting to see what the result would be from making a vodka from different potato varieties grown in different fields.”
Read how Borrell’s experiment turned into a roaring business success – the THEfirstNEWS report can be accessed here
