"Make it Selesian brandy all around."

"The landers do make good brandy."

She was tried and acquitted for cattle rustling in her 60s and made brandy and wine from local fruit and berries during Prohibition.

Inside an old brick barn built by Stanford to make brandy, the stones began to be fitted together, laid flat on Burke's plywood templates.

If you distilled something more interesting - a Riesling or a Sauvignon Blanc - it would make dreadful brandy.

By chance, one day in 1981 he picked up Germain-Robin, who was hitchhiking throughout California in search of a location to make brandy.

Most of what survived was barely good enough to make cheap brandy.

"Anyone with access to grapes and the simplest of distillation apparatus can make brandy of a sort," Mr. Faith writes.

There he helped cultivate the early vines and made brandy and wines.

Likewise, most of the South African chenin blanc, occasionally known as steen, was historically blended into bad bulk wines or even used to make brandy.