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Every bottle of D&S · 43°Sur starts long before the still: it starts in the field, in Gaiman, in the hands of our family and the people who work alongside us. This is the journey the fruit takes before becoming a spirit.
Before pruning, before the harvest, even before planting, there's the nursery. That's where we propagate our own trees to later take them to the growing fields and keep expanding our production. It's a circular economy in its simplest form: every new plant comes from the ones we already have, with no outside dependence, preserving the same genetic material we've known and trusted for years.
Before each tree leaves the nursery, the field has to be ready to receive it: we prepare the soil, lay out the irrigation lines, and carefully choose where each plant goes, thinking about the space, light, and wind that will accompany it through its whole productive life. Cherry trees are a long-lived species: they only start producing from the fourth year after planting, so during those years we focus on training the tree so it reaches harvest time in the best possible condition.
As soon as one harvest wraps up, the next one begins. Through the Patagonian winter we prune every single tree, one by one. It's manual, slow, highly skilled work: every cut decides how the tree will grow and what quality of fruit we'll get the following year. There are no shortcuts; pruning is done by hand, tree by tree, the same way it's been done since 2000.
While pruning moves forward, the land is also being prepared: every meter of the irrigation system gets checked, the soil is worked, and plant health is monitored. It's a quiet stretch, with no harvest in sight, but this is where much of the season gets decided. Everything that will later become fruit starts taking shape in these months in the field.
In spring, just as the fruit is starting to form, the most fragile moment of the year arrives: a late frost can wipe out an entire season's work in a single night. That's why, on high-risk nights, we watch over the fields until dawn, tracking the temperature, ready to act the moment it's needed. It's a vigil that repeats several times every spring, carried out with the same dedication we later bring to the harvest: there's no good fruit if it isn't protected in time.
Between November and December, our farms fill with people and motion. Fruit is picked by hand, one cherry at a time, choosing each one at just the right point of ripeness. This is work done season after season with the same people who come back year after year to be part of it. There's craft, patience, and even affection in every crate that gets filled: behind every cherry we go on to distill, there's a story of shared work.
Part of our harvest takes a different path than fresh sale: fermentation. Cherries, pears, and plums ferment slowly until they become must, preserving at every step the character of the Patagonian fruit and of the season it was picked in.
From the must comes the moment of distillation: a careful, precise, artisanal process where we separate out the aromas and flavors we want to keep in every bottle. It's the quietest stage of all, and also the most defining one: this is where a full year of work in the field becomes the bottles that carry our family's name.
The cycle doesn't end at the bottle: we make our own compost, giving back to the land the nourishment that later becomes new fruit. That's how we close the circle between the nursery, the farm, and the still, caring for the soil and the whole ecosystem around us with the same sustainability standard we've worked by since day one.