Rachel Tettleton
The tasting room at Wonderbird Spirits in Taylor, MS.
“It took us three years of our life to learn how to make this,” said Rob Forster as he poured me a taste from the freezer of Wonderbird gin, No. 61.
Forster is one of Wonderbird Spirits’ three owners. I took the scenic drive to the distillery in Taylor, Mississippi on a Monday afternoon, less than twelve minutes from the Historic Square in downtown Oxford—home of William Faulkner, the University of Mississippi, James Beard Foundation Award-winning restaurants, and a community known for enjoying a strong gin and tonic on a sweltering August day.
In 2019, Chand Harlow and Tom Alexander, along with Forster, uprooted their lives to create the first grain-to-glass gin in the state of Mississippi. They are also the only distillery in the country and one of three in the world creating gin from rice as their substrate.
Recently having completed a new expansion, tripling the distillery’s physical and operational footprint, the team at Wonderbird is now on the path to take their influence to the next level. I wanted to know how far beyond Oxford the partners intend to take the spirit. What sets Wonderbird apart in the lineup on the liquor shelves, so much so that these three guys left their careers to spread its gospel? And five years in, what’s the next step?
Rachel Tettleton
The owners of Wonderbird Spirits, from left to right: Thomas Alexander, Chand Harlow, and Rob Forster.
“We went through this huge, long deal of fun when we learned how to make this,” said Forster of the sample he’d prepped for me. “She's been our flagship for three years now.” He described Wonderbird’s signature gin as starting out similar to sake, pointing to the traditional Koji cabinet sourced from a Nashville sake maker. Made from Suki wood, a Japanese cedar, the cabinet meticulously controls the temperature and humidity to allow for ideal fermentation conditions. “We take a bunch of our rice, clean it, and steam it in that mash cooker, and then inoculate it with a mold spore that we import from Japan called ‘Koji’ to ferment,” explained Forster. The Koji then breaks down the rice on a molecular level, releasing the sugars. They are essentially making sake as the first step of the gin, not dissimilar to the beer-like stage of whiskey and bourbon.
Every bottle at Wonderbird is hand filled, labeled, and shipped out from their small facility. The sample I tried was in a tasting vessel thrown by potter Keith Stewart a few miles down the road in Taylor. In front of Forster was a box with a thimble-size measures of the ten botanicals used in the spirit, and the local rice that is its base.
The label of “61” on the flagship gin, which is created using rice from Two Brooks Farm in Sumner County, is a tribute to the fact that this batch was the sixty-first attempt at creating the perfect botanical combination during the recipe development stage. In true grain-to-glass fashion, each botanical is carefully sourced, some from the very field the distillery stands on.
Rachel Tettleton
The casks where specialty gins at Wonderbird are being finished.
“Two of the ten botanicals are foraged from our land: red clover—which grows all over our pasture, all over the Mississippi highways, and imparts a bit of a chamomile-ish note and earthiness—and then, southern pine needles from trees in our back pasture.”
To ensure a consistent product, Alexander carefully manages the botanical sourcing and setup in the distillation process. “We went through probably seven or eight types of juniper berries before settling on the ones we use for our gin,” he explained.
The novelty doesn’t stop with the sourcing of the botanicals, but extends to how they are imparted into the spirit. Wonderbird is known as one of the only distilleries in the world to distill each of their botanicals individually, rather than en masse, through dry vapor distillation. “We manifest that as perfectly as possible and combine them after the fact.”
This separate vaporization process is especially important for their experimental gins, such as the limited-run Magnolia expression, No. 97, which has five botanicals, including highly fragrant, dificult-to-source magnolia petals.
“We go around town with cases of the flagship No. 61, and we go to people's doors and say, ‘Hey, I’ll trade you a bottle of gin if I can go in your back yard with this pulse saw and take some of your magnolia flowers,’” said Forster.
After the Magnolia experimental, which itself was stunning, Forster poured me a glass of the gin he was most enthusiastic to share: one of several experimental cask-finished gins, all limited to one-barrel production in a single fifty-three gallon drum. The process produces 263 bottles, “and then it will never exist again in the world,” said Forster. I am not usually a person who seeks out floral notes, so I was unsure if this would be to my taste. I was pleasantly surprised. It was soft, buttery, light, and had a hint of summer. It would be excellent on its own with a subtle tonic or possibly with cucumber.
Rachel Tettleton
Wonderbird's flagship gin, No. 61.
The final gin he shared with me was a Weller-cask finish of the flagship, No. 61. As someone whose first drink of alcohol was straight out of a fifth of Old Weller Antique at the Southern Foodways Alliance Symposium (other than a communion-sized sip at my grandmother’s during Christmas), I was elated to try this cask-finished gin. The flavor contained the oak-ey, caramel, vanilla, and somewhat chocolatey notes of a Weller without tasting so dark as to remove the light and smooth texture of the carefully curated botanicals.
Wonderbird’s recent operations expansion will bring opportunities to delve deeper into the local markets where they are currently, in addition to targeting some heavy hitters like New York, Chicago, and D.C. Wonderbird is currently in liquor stores and on bar shelves in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, Texas, and the Florida Panhandle, with some placements in New York and California.
Cultivating its place in the Mississippi culture for locals and visitors, Wonderbird hosts appointment-only cocktail experiences at the distillery on Thursday nights. Intimate, with a simple, limited menu and a tour of the facility, the evening gives customers a chance to connect with the spirit as well as the people who make it—creating a lasting impression. “Those folks go back to Memphis or go back to wherever and say to the folks back home, ‘Man, you guys got to check that place out!’”
In May, the team’s outreach fostered an opportunity to host Neal Bodenheimer, the James Beard Award-winning owner of CURE in New Orleans, for a signing of his book Cure: New Orleans Drinks and How to Mix Them, and a conversation with City Grocery owner/chef, John Currence. Over two hundred people attended.
“Neal taking the time to come to Oxford and associate his name with our brand is such a gift,” said Forster. “Hearing John and Neal, two James Beard Award-winning chefs, talk about their time behind the bar and their upbringing in New Orleans, and truly share their passion for what they do made the evening magical.” He and his partners are hopeful to host more high-profile spirit and culinary events in the future. “Executing an event of that caliber in our newly updated distillery space puts a lot of wind in our sails for the road ahead.
Wonderbird Spirits can be shipped to thirty-six states across the country, at wonderbirdspirits.com. Or, plan to visit in person on Thursday nights for cocktail service; reservations required.
