Ten years ago, when he was running a French-Asian fusion restaurant in Paris, Jean-Denis Courtin tried infusing vodka with mint-flavored chewing gum. That, unsurprisingly, was a flop: “It was a little bit scary,” he admits. But he continued the experiment with other ingredients—caramel, vanilla, fruit, herbs—and eventually had hits with mint, raspberry, and watermelon flavors that both he and his customers liked.
Vodka is usually made from grain—wheat or rye, most commonly—or potatoes, but it can be distilled from pretty much anything with natural sugars, including fruits and vegetables. Ciroc vodka, the first made from grapes, sparked controversy in the EU when it launched in 2002 and prompted traditionalists to push for a ban on vodkas made from anything other than cereals or potatoes. That campaign failed, and today there are at least half a dozen vodkas made from grapes as well as several made from apples. Three vodka, launched in 2005, is made from soy isolates and “select grains” and markets itself as the first soy vodka. On top of this, of course, vodka now comes infused with almost every flavor imaginable—lemon or orange, pepper or ginger, coffee or chocolate. A couple local places are even making their own bacon-infused vodka.
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Though limited by not speaking Spanish, he communicated with the farmers a little and saw how they lived—without sufficient food, clothes, or medical supplies and mostly without electricity or schools. He decided then to donate a percentage of Qino One’s profits to the co-op. “I’m not telling you I’m going to work without making money,” he says. “But to share a little bit—it’s not bad.”
But while he’s not producing a huge quantity of vodka, Courtin sees no reason to limit its variety. A raspberry-infused version of Qino One has been on the market in Chicago since mid-May; kumquat and mint, the next flavors to be introduced, will be released in September. And he’s in the process of expanding the brand beyond vodka: a quinoa beer is also due out next year, along with a quinoa whiskey.
And when he gets bored with that? Well, Courtin speculates, he might like to own a hotel. All hotels are all the same, he says—his would be different. He’d design it himself, incorporating unusual elements like one he used in one of his Paris restaurants: he put an ice maker on the ceiling with a glass tube looping up to it from the bar so that patrons could watch the ice on its way down. “I’d like to break the rules a little bit,” he says.
