世界上的莫st Tree-Friendly Spirit Is Also Delicious

自2019年就职典礼以来，巴西总统贾尔·博尔森罗（Jair Bolsonaro）加快了像亚马逊这样对环境敏感地区的破坏。像许多其他环保主义者一样，我想知道我能做些什么来帮助遏制一个不是我自己的国家的领导者的生物多样性议程。

As it turns out, one thing I can do isdrink. Through their Un-Endangered Forest project, the folks atNovo Fogo，一个品牌cachaça，巴西民族精神的使命是保护和补充该国的濒危树木和重要的栖息地。在使自己成为带有Novo Fogo的鸡尾酒时，或者喝了桶形的表情，我支持世界上最可持续的精神品牌之一，并帮助重新恢复巴西原住民雨林。

The project is the brainchild of Novo Fogo founder, Dragos Axinte. Born in Romania, Axinte emigrated to the United States two decades ago, when he was 18. His family settled in Seattle, where they turned the ColdHeat soldering gun, a garage invention of Axinte's father, into a global business. When work brought him to Brazil in 2005, Axinte fell for the country whose soccer stars he had idolized as a kid.

More to the point, he fell in love with cachaça, a sugar cane distillate with the sweet, grassy flavor of its base ingredient. Brazilians blend unaged cachaça into the caipirinha, a transcendent muddling of lime, sugar, and spirit that is Brazil's national drink. Aged cachaça, turned amber with time in wood barrels, is enjoyed neat. Thousands of producers make the spirit, many of them small, farmstead operations. Few cachaças are imported, so in 2010, Axinte started his own brand with an eye on bringing more of the spirit to the States.

Axinte's Novo Fogo distillery is located near the colonial town of Morretes within a protected zone of Brazil's Atlantic Forest. Once twice the size of Texas, the Atlantic Forest has been shrunk by 88 percent by logging and clearing for farms and ranches. It is, nevertheless, the world's second-largest UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, home to more than 20,000 plant and animal species, many of them endangered.

Novo Fogorelies on the terroir of this forest for the floral, tropical, earthy notes in its cachaça, so the environment dictates its production methods. As Axinte puts it, "Novo Fogo's commitment to sustainability and environmentally sound practices has been quite literally embedded in the earth that grows our sugarcane."

Novo Fogo's cane is farmed organically, without the use of chemicals that would harm the forest's delicate ecology. Instead of burning the fields or machine harvesting, workers hand-cut the cane with machetes. Staff is salaried with benefits, rather than paid by quantity harvested (as is common), so the operation favors quality over quantity. In a zero-waste process, workers press cane juice, ferment it with indigenous yeast, and gravity-feed downslope into the distillery. Spent pulp is reserved for fertilizer for the fields, or it is burned for the steam that fuels the copper-pot stills.

所得的cachaça富含莫雷特风土的风味。在不锈钢罐中休息了一年，热带水果和柑橘的银色香肠味，海洋喷雾和甜绿草。陈旧的表情sm摩卡和香料。最吸引人的是两木系列的Cachaças。它们都在二手美国橡木和重复或可持续收获的巴西硬木中陈化，它们揭示了特定树木的风味。巴西斑马木从解构的房屋中恢复了，使Novo Fogo Tanager具有焦糖，樱桃木和苦涩的Amaro的深琥珀色和风味。格拉西奥萨（Graciosa）在巴西坚果树Castanheira dopará完成，提供了浓郁的黑麦木质香料，结合了热带水果的口味。我最喜欢的Colibri在橡树和巴西的Amburana桶之间来回转移，是椰子，明亮的菠萝和香草。在高球和各种tiki风格的饮料中都很好吃。

All the expressions are part of a robust tradition of aged cachaça that began centuries ago, with the transport of the spirit in woods casks as Brazil spread westward, says Novo Fogo marketing director Luke McKinley. Today, 90 percent of cachaça is barrel-aged. That's been part of the industry's environmental problems. With the clearing of land for cane fields and the felling of old-growth hardwoods for barrels, the production of cachaça, the world's fifth largest spirit category, has helped lead more than 300 Brazilian tree species toward extinction.

但是Novo Fogo的Two-Woods系列不同。该公司艰苦地验证了它使用的所有巴西木材。不仅如此，该系列是一种强调Novo Fogo的无界森林项目的方式。Novo Fogo与可持续林业专家Silvia R. Ziller博士合作，他的任务是重新填充大西洋森林中30多种濒危树。项目生物学家跋涉进入丛林，绘制“母木”的位置，其种子被收集，饲养到幼苗，然后在酿酒厂和邻近的物业中种植。

Ziller报告说，自2018年以来，已在20个物业上种植了20多种物种的1,444颗幼苗。目的是每年生产约500个幼苗进行分配。她说：“尽管大多数森林修复项目都集中在森林砍伐地区重建树木，但使用快速增长的先驱物种，但无偏见的森林正在下一步进行。”“这个想法不是要生产大量幼苗，而是要生产大量的受威胁和稀有物种的幼苗，这些物种需要广泛分布在景观中，以帮助长期恢复人口。”

该团队计划将来将种植植物扩展到其他市政当局，以独特的数字指纹跟踪每棵树的进度。巴西硬木生长缓慢。齐勒说：“其中一些树木开始生产自己的水果可能需要10到20年，但是到那时，森林中肯定会有更多的水果。”

With $3 of every case of Novo Fogo sold supporting the Un-Endangered Forest project, Axinte's ambitions are big. "We believe that, within a few years, our project can reach national levels and eventually increase the numbers of these species by millions of specimens, eventually removing them from the threatened list," he says.

Glass of Novo Fogo Colibri in hand, that's a future I can toast to.