Ever wonder how a bunch of folks who aren’t exactly a stone’s throw from Emilia-Romagna in Northern Italy ended up recreating one of the region’s most beloved booze specialities in British Columbia? For the family behind Vancouver Island’s Ampersand Distilling, the decision to start making the Italian green-walnut-based liqueur nocino sprang from a suggestion.

As anyone who’s ever had a plum, fig, or American beechnut tree on their property knows, there’s a yearly problem. When it’s picking time, you either stuff yourself full of plums, figs, or American beechnuts for a straight week, begin dropping bags off to any neighbour who’ll stupidly answer the door, or watch while the local squirrels, rats, racoons, deer, fruits flies, Old World fruit bats, and Strathcona tent-city denizens have a field day.

That’s evidently a problem that doesn’t stop in Greater Vancouver.

Ampersand’s award-winning Nocino! can be traced back to an abundance of walnuts. The family run distillery’s cofounder Jessica Schacht remembers a friend with a tree reaching out around 2015. After encouraging the Ampersand team—which includes Jessica’s husband Jeremy Schacht, father-in-law Stephen Schacht, and mother-in-law Ramona Schacht—to take home a bushel or 10, the journey to creating nocino started.

“We made it for ourselves for a couple of years and tinkered with the recipe a bit,” Jessica tells the Straight. “We are always interested in things from a cocktail perspective and so we were interested in the possibilities a nocino would offer us.”

In the beginning, there were challenges that required some on-the-fly innovating.

“As I mentioned, we source most of our walnuts from a single tree in our friend’s backyard,” Jessica relates. “That friend is actually now a full-time employee of the distillery working on the production side with Jeremy. But so many people in the valley came forward and offered us their trees to pick. It’s become a yearly tradition to go out and about and pick walnuts.

“Chopping them all is definitely challenging,” she continues. “We hand chopped for the first couple years, but last year Jeremy finally built us this sort of ultimate chopping machine, so that saves our hands and a lot of time.”

Ampersand’s Nocino! has been a past gold-medal winner at the Canadian Artisan Spirit competition, and a top finisher in best non-fruit liqueur at the Sip Awards Best of the Northwest. The ingredients are simple enough—start with walnuts while still green in summer and then blend with locally sourced honey, as well as cinnamon and allspice. Still the process took some time to refine.

“We tinkered with the recipe over two years,” Jessica reveals. “It’s challenging with seasonal things because you can only really do it once a year. And there will be variations depending on what the summer is like, how the walnuts ripen, when we pick them. But yeah, just a couple changes before we settled on a recipe.”

Because Ampersand is a small family-run operation, and presumably because there are only so many walnuts to go around and a brief window for when they can be used for nocino, the distillery’s take on the liquer is only available for a limited amount of time.

One might assume that the target audience starts with folks who spend their days reminiscing about Emilia-Romagna and the Old Country at the Italian coffee shops of Commercial Drive. That perception isn’t entirely inaccurate.

“We were so excited to have students from the Slow Food University in Italy visit because we were like ‘We make nocino, they’ll know what that is!’” Jessica notes. “And their response was like ‘Oh yeah, my grandpa drinks that.’”

But the audience certainly doesn’t stop there.

“We make Nocino! mostly for other cocktail nerds like us, but it’s also for anyone who’s interested in the terroir of our valley—the nuts and honey are both local,” Jessica says. “We are also just so interested in all the different plants that go into making the world’s spirits. From a farming perspective, it’s so fascinating to find the history and future all wrapped up in the nature around us.”

Not sure what to do with nocino? Here's a recipe, courtesy of Ampersand, to add to your cocktail nerd arsenal. 

Nocino! Alexander

2 oz brandy
1 oz. Nocino!
1 oz. heavy cream
1.2 oz simple syrup
Grated nutmeg
Combine ingredients in an ice-filled cocktail shaker and shake vigorously. Fine strain into a chilled coupe glass and garnish with grated nutmeg.