Welcome to Craft Aperitivo
Brad and I founded Wilderton in 2019 with a vision to raise the bar for craft non-alcoholic beverages. With combined decades of experience in the spirits industry, we also wanted to prove how a commitment to craft makes a better product regardless of alcohol content. For us, craft means a lot of things: it means working with real botanicals, not flavor chemicals. It means avoiding synthetic preservatives and colors. It means doing things the hard way without shortcuts, because we believe that craft processes make better products. Plus we wouldn’t do it any other way.
How we turn Raw Botanicals into Craft Aperitivos
An aperitivo should open with a splash of bright aromatics followed by intriguing flavors on the palate like bitterness and astringency. To capture the full spectrum of flavors that give our aperitivos their characteristic boldness, we have so use multiple extraction techniques. Distillation is one of them, but not the only one. The production process for Bittersweet and Citrus Aperitivo is more complex, making use of at least four extraction techniques including distillation. In this way, it looks a lot like the way aperitivos have been made in Italy for centuries.
Each botanical offers something unique to the finished product. Over decades working with botanicals I’ve developed an intuitive relationship with each one, learning how to draw out the right flavor using the right process, while harmonizing them according to a creative (and secret) formula. Craft exists in every step of the process.