If you’ve got a hankering for strawberry rhubarb vodka, look no further than Del Ray.
For the last year and a half, Orkney Springs Distillery has bottled and sold small batches of gluten-free, organic gin and vodka at its facility at 3125 Mount Vernon Avenue in Del Ray. The award-winning recipes are all made on a 140-acre farm in the Shenandoah Valley, and the Del Ray tasting room costs $30 per person and is open by appointment only.
Patrons are limited to two drinks per tasting event, with the option of taking a bottle home for an additional $30.
Clark, a government contractor with his own management consulting firm, saw his business decline during the pandemic. In an interview, he told ALXnow that he leaned into his hobbies, which are making alcohol and fishing.
ALXnow: How did you get into the alcohol business?
Clark: I was the president of a small management consulting firm doing electronic health records, working with Health and Human Services. As a government contractor, when COVID hit, that company took a pretty big hit, and so I just continued to work on my hobbies. In 2014, I started looking into making an Orkney Springs beer. I used the water from the spring out there to make my product, but that year, there were a lot of beer manufacturers popping up in Virginia. It went from like 10 to more than 100. So, I applied for the licenses and made a hop gin and a European wheat vodka. I entered my European wheat vodka in the Denver International Spirits Competition in 2021, and we got a gold medal.
ALXnow: Did you ever end up making beer?
Clark: We never started making beer. The original intent was to make beer and also sell fresh, organic hops to beer manufacturers in Virginia. During that process, we put in the hop yard, and we started growing the hops. We thought we’d be able to sell the hops we didn’t use, but we quickly found out that almost everybody in Virginia buys Chinese equipment and can’t use whole cone fresh hops in their brews.
We couldn’t sell a whole cone, so we had to either get a pelletizer, which was another investment, or decide not to do that. Instead, we decided to figure out a product.
ALXnow: You focused on alcohol?
Clark: Right. We settled on making a hop gin and a European wheat vodka. At the time, we were getting our wheat from Italy, which is 100% non-GMO. The only non-GMO wheat left in the world is in Northern Europe.
ALXnow: How small are your batches?
Clark: Our production is under 1,000 bottles a year right now. It’s all handmade, hand-bottled. Originally, I was only making 24 bottles at a time. Now I have a pour machine that will pour into four bottles at the same time, but you have to manually load and unload it.
ALXnow: How did you end up with the bottling plant in Del Ray?
Clark: We used to have part of the operation out in the Shenandoah Valley at the farm, and we were told that it needed to be on a separate piece of land. We pulled that license back, moved our license from our Springfield warehouse, where we could get our ethanol delivered and things like that. The Springfield location didn’t work either, and I just happened to have this building that I had my IT company in Del Ray, and I was trying to sell it at the time.
ALXnow: No kidding?
Clark: Yeah, I couldn’t sell it, and the area ended up being rezoned to light industrial, which is perfect for me. And it’s all grown by word-of-mouth. We didn’t do a ton of advertising. We still don’t, but a lot of that is that we’re just trying to figure out what business model is going to work in Del Ray. It’s light industrial, it’s not a restaurant, it’s retail. We can’t run a full-scale restaurant there, but we can offer a cold plate menu.
ALXnow: What do folks want to drink in the summer?
Clark: The big ones right now are the strawberry rhubarb vodka and the cherry watermelon basil vodka. Those are our big summer hits. And then with our gins, it would be the cherry almond gin, and then our grapefruit gin. We’re soon going to launch an apple pie gin and a chicory vodka. This fall, we’ll bring back our gingerbread and peppermint vodkas, and other seasonal stuff.
ALXnow: Any future expansion plans on the horizon?
Clark: As far as future expansion, we’re looking to put a place in Orkney Springs, you know, to replace the warehouse and everything that we had out there initially.
ALXnow: What’s special about the water in Orkney Springs?
Clark: It’s really, really clean spring water. We take our water from the seventh spring out there.
ALXnow: What’s the difference in taste between Virginia-grown wheat products and what you sell?
Clark: If you make 100% wheat vodka out of Virginia wheat, it will be absolutely terrible. I don’t hesitate to tell people to put our vodka up against anybody that has Virginia-grown products in their products now, because we don’t use Virginia-grown products. You do not get really ultra-bitter flavors from the Northern European wheat, whereas you get a lot of extra proteins from the GMO products. They have extra proteins in them, and all kinds of things that don’t do well with fermentation.
