“If you think about just bourbon, based on what we taste today, we know only a couple of colors in the spectrum. We don’t know all the colors that were there years ago. Discovering that is fun stuff for me.”

The owners of this Ancram, New York, distillery are keen on terrior.

“Everything we sell here was 100 percent grown, mashed, distilled—everything—right here on the farm,” explains Ashley Frey, Colby’s wife and the distillery’s marketing manager. “Within a mile radius, basically. Nothing has left our possession until you buy the bottle—it’s totally under our control.”