LONDON, July 18 — When a connoisseur of liquor wanted to distill the prose and poetry of the Bronte sisters into a bottle, he decided it would have notes of blackberry, sloe, wild honey and jasmine.
Sir James Akroyd, who has held senior positions at Speyside Distillers, Buchanan’s whisky and Martini and Rosso, has created Bronte Liqueur in homage of the literary sisters who gave the world classics like Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
The story of the liqueur, which hit UK store shelves recently, is a long and circuitous one that starts, not on the windswept moors of the Yorkshire, but 10,300 km away in Paraguay in the late 1960s.
While staying at a hotel in Asuncion during a business trip promoting whisky, Akroyd spied a curious ceramic flacon behind the bar with the words “Yorkshire Liqueur” on the label, he explains on the product website.
That was more than 40 years ago.
The bottle piqued his interest all the more given his connection to the Bronte family: In 1928, his great grandfather bought Haworth village parsonage where the Bronte family lived, and where the sisters penned their timeless classics, and gifted it to the Bronte Society.
After decades of trying to obtain rights to the bottle, Akroyd’s dream has hit UK shelves.
A 700 ml bottle retails for £27 (RM147). Discussions are underway to distribute the liqueur in Russia, Scandinavia, Spain, Japan, the UAE, Canada and the US. — AFP-Relaxnews
