Tuthilltown Spirits

In the Hudson Valley, where the Shawangunk Ridge catches morning mist and the ghosts of Dutch settlers still whisper through stone walls, Ralph Erenzo found his calling in 2003 among the bones of history. The grist mill had been grinding grain since 1788, its wheel turning with the seasons for more than two centuries before Erenzo saw something else in its weathered timbers and fieldstone foundation.

The mill sat patient as a monument, waiting. When Erenzo fired his first still, the vapors that rose carried more than alcohol—they carried the end of a seventy-year silence. These were the first legal grain spirits distilled in New York since Prohibition had shuttered the state's distilleries and sent their copper stills to scrap yards or hidden cellars.

The Hudson River runs thirty miles east, but it's the smaller waters threading through this valley that matter here. Springs that fed the mill's wheel now feed the mash, carrying the mineral signature of Shawangunk limestone and the patience of deep aquifers. The water remembers what the land has always known: that grain and stone and time make something greater than their sum.

Erenzo's Hudson Baby Bourbon and Hudson Manhattan Rye emerged from this marriage of old stones and new purpose. The mill's thick walls, built to contain the thunder of grinding stones, now hold the gentler percussion of fermentation and the whispered conversations between spirit and oak. Each barrel aging in these rooms carries the weight of place—not just New York grain, but New York itself, distilled.

The craft distilling movement found fertile ground here in the Hudson Valley, where innovation has always grown alongside tradition. When William Grant & Sons recognized what Erenzo had built, they weren't just acquiring a distillery—they were inheriting a resurrection story, written in copper and grain.

Today, steam still rises from Tuthilltown's stills as it once rose from the mill's grinding stones. The wheel no longer turns, but the work continues, transforming the Hudson Valley's harvest into something that speaks of this particular patch of American earth, this marriage of old stones and new dreams, this quiet revolution that began with one man's vision of what could rise from what had been.