One night as Lance Winters walked from his apartment to the laundromat, he went by an orange tree in full bloom. The fragrance blew him away. Later he asked a friend if he could pick the flowers off her orange tree. She thought he was kind of crazy, but let him pick a bucketful of blossoms. Lance distilled them right away, and -- it came out perfect. So the Mandarin blossom infusion was the first idea that came to mind when St George Spirits decided to to make a high-end vodka.

Many parts of a citrus tree have the same fragrance and flavor characteristics as the fruit. We like using the Mandarin flowers because they allow us to capture complex and floral citrus characteristics without having to depend on unstable acids from the fruit’s juice.

It takes us about 100 pounds of Mandarin blossoms (that’s about the size of an oil drum) to do two bottlings of the Mandarin Blossom vodka. It takes someone about an hour to harvest one pound of Mandarin blossoms, and they have to be picked at the height of bloom (which also means there are lots of bees) - so it’s a pretty labor-intensive process, but the result is so worth it! Incidentally, the Mandarin Blossom vodka makes a great perfume.