Photograph courtesy of Still Austin.
In the Berkeley hills, there’s a neighborhood of gracious old homes. In the neighborhood is a cul-de-sac. In that cul-de-sac is a white stucco house with an arched doorway and a magnolia in the yard. In the living room of that house is a tall wooden cabinet, and inside that cabinet is a library of Nancy Fraley’s favorite spirits. Some she’s worked on herself. Some are vintage Armagnac many decades older than she is. And one, she says with a smile, is the most challenging thing she’s ever worked on. She’s been working on it for years, and it hasn’t been released yet — but it will be soon.
Nancy Fraley is a blender at the top of her game. As one of the craft spirits industry’s longest-tenured consultants, she’s behind a vast array of award-winning spirits. “It’s probably several hundred,” she says with a shrug. “But I’ve lost count, honestly.”
That’s because awards are not what motivates Fraley. She’s not hunting out new clients or packing her schedule with speaking engagements. She doesn’t have a website. She’s even a little sheepish about her title, which she only started using when her mentors began referring to her that way. “Sometimes I feel embarrassed to be called a master blender, because to be a master of something is years of study,” she says earnestly. Instead, the driving force for Fraley — what’s kept her at this for nearly 20 years — is making craft spirits better.
“Quality is all that matters to me at the end of the day,” she says.
Fraley’s detachment is not an affect. A longtime student of Tibetan Buddhism, she studied comparative religion in college and then went on to divinity school before segueing to human rights law. She seems to know that, while recognition is always nice, her true impact can’t be measured in stacks of medals or purchase orders; it’s in the sea change she’s brought about in the industry by adapting and introducing traditional French blending techniques for American craft distillers.
Thanks to Fraley, an entire cohort of distillers, many of whom have never set foot in France, now casually toss about lingo like boisé, petits eaux, slow proofing, and tannin management with the easy familiarity of a tenth-generation bouilleur de cru. While she was at it, she introduced Americans — longtime worshippers at the altar of the master distiller — to the notion of a master blender and the true importance of everything that happens after the still’s been turned off.
A Curious Career
Fraley’s interest in spirits started in her late 20s when she was introduced to the practice of blind tasting by a former partner with a penchant for wine. Her photographic memory for flavors — she says she still remembers the exact dates of the first times she had Ethiopian or Mexican foods — served her well. She could pick out subtle notes that eluded her companions and easily tell the difference between even very similar bottles.
It remained simply a fun party trick until 2005, when she attended a fundraiser where Germain-Robin was pouring its entire portfolio. “That experience literally changed my life,” says Fraley. Enchanted by the nuanced complexity of those remarkable California brandies, and encouraged by her supportive partner, Naomi, Fraley began devoting her free time to the study of distillation. The distinctive French approach to making spirits, with its minute focus on every variable and its embrace of complexity, appealed to her scholarly mindset. Soon, she had taken a production gig at Germain-Robin and started traveling extensively in France to spend time learning from Cognac and Armagnac producers with generations of distilling experience.
It was a formative time, but commuting from the Bay Area to Germain-Robin’s distillery in Ukiah several days a week was unsustainable. Plus, Fraley didn’t want to work for just one company. “I wanted the flexibility and security of multiple clients,” she says. “So I very consciously tried to develop a new model of the freelance master blender.” She also knew she’d have to specialize in something other than brandy. “As much as I loved brandy, the bread and butter in the U.S. is whiskey,” says Fraley. If she was going to make a living, she would have to focus on products Americans already made and already wanted. To do so, she would need to develop not only her own skills, but the interest and understanding of her market — a market that was skeptical of blending, unfamiliar with French brandies, and in the early days of a national boom.
Rehabilitating Blending
In the late 2000s, the prevailing ethos in American distilling was “set it and forget it.” New make spirit was filled into new oak casks, stashed in a warehouse, and then retrieved and bottled several years later. That approach was reinforced by the standards of identity for American whiskeys like bourbon and rye, which could not be moved from one cask to another without stopping the all-important age statement ticker. Plus, American drinkers still had a bad taste in their mouths from poor quality blended bourbons that had been marketed in the 20th century, making them wary of anything to do with the infamous b-word.
Nevertheless, Fraley saw elements from French brandy production that could be employed in rye and bourbon, improving quality while retaining those specific attributes that made the categories distinct. Techniques like slow proofing, attention to temperature and humidity in the warehouse, careful choice of water, and meticulous cooperage selection were not widely practiced in the United States, especially among the then-new and fast-growing craft distilling movement. Budding distillers were thirsty for reliable technical information. All the pieces were there: an eager audience, growing interest, and an opportunity for Fraley to make a real impact. “I saw an opening before it existed,” she says.
Fraley figured the best way to learn would be to teach, so she began offering workshops through the American Distilling Institute. Her first Nosing for Faults workshop was in 2013. Not long after she began to teach multi-day workshops on blending, maturation, and warehousing. Today, thousands of professionals have passed through one of Fraley’s classes for firsthand experience on how humidity and temperature affect maturation, what saponified whiskey tastes like, and why the mineral profile of proofing water matters so much.
Christi Lower, founder of Highline Spirits in Dexter, Michigan, took Fraley’s blending, warehousing, and maturation workshop in 2022. “What I found so helpful,” she says, “was not just the information — because everyone knows Nancy is a wealth of knowledge — but also her anecdotal experiences, her approachability, and her kindness. It was really wonderful to be able to have a conversation with this great, who is recognized across the world as a source of knowledge, and find her to be so easy to talk to and learn from.”
Fraley says American distillers were skeptical of French techniques at first. But soon, they began to see the impact the highly refined suite of French distilling and maturation techniques known as élevage — which embraces the life of the spirit, from fermentation to bottling — began to have on their products.
Today, the techniques she popularized in the U.S. have permeated throughout the industry. “Cigar blends” — releases designed to pair particularly well with cigars — were once the exclusive province of Cognac and Scotch. Now those words are appearing on craft releases from upstart American producers. Slow water reduction, a hallmark of French maturation, is now used to give American whiskeys nuance and character and reduce saponification, although it’s clothed in new North American lingo like “slow cuts.” Air-dried and toasted cooperage, de rigueur in Cognac, has moved from an oddity to the mainstream in the United States.
“We’re seeing distilleries who are trying to do things the right way,” she says. “That’s really refreshing. I want craft distilling to get its good name back.”
Making Bourbon the French Way
Alongside her workshops, Fraley has served as a freelance master blender for a small handful of prominent producers. Once she signs on with a brand, she tends to stay. While she’s had a handful of shorter engagements during her career, she’s been with the same four brands — Jos A. Magnus, J. Henry and Sons, Wyoming Whiskey, and Still Austin — for the past eleven years. Recently, she’s transitioned to a sort of master blender emeritus role for Wyoming Whiskey and J. Henry, but she remains tightly linked to the projects. “I am intensely loyal to, and believe in, those distilleries,” she says. They believe in her, too.
“Nancy is an absolute joy to work with,” says Chris Seals, co-founder and CEO of Still Austin Whiskey Company. “We’ve learned so much from working with her and are incredibly grateful for what we’ve been able to make together. She’s very tough with her standards, and that’s helped protect the quality of what we make. What’s most amazing to me is how she never stops learning and how she continues to incorporate those learnings all the time. You simply can’t be Nancy without committing yourself to decades of daily practice.”
Fraley keeps a low profile for someone with the depth of her influence. Part of that may be her understated style. But there’s a lot about her — her gender, her age, her introversion, her seriousness, her home on the West Coast and not Kentucky — that sits well outside the mainstream of American whiskey. It’s hard to imagine, for example, a folksy, country ham-chomping good ol’ boy earnestly drawling about how whiskey is “conceived in fermentation, gestates in a copper womb, and is born from the parrot.” Fraley’s whiskeys also tend to taste different than the mainstream, with shyer oak and a Cognac-influenced approach to texture and flavor complexity.
With nearly two decades of experience under her belt, Fraley’s still trying new things, and she’s still not afraid to zig while others are zagging. As cask-finished whiskeys proliferate in the U.S. market, Fraley — who has historically used finishing casks for releases like the popular Joseph Magnus Cigar Blend — says she’s moving away from them when possible. She’s currently working on a trendy “hazmat” whiskey for a client, but she’s insistent that it also be elegant and restrained despite its super high proof. “I like to make bourbon the French way,” she insists.
To illustrate what that means, Fraley pours two glasses of that mystery bottle from the cabinet, the one she said was so hard to make. “What do you smell?” she asks, in the tell-me-the-truth tone of a trial lawyer. “Do you like it?” I mumble about vanilla and tobacco, wanting to get the answer “right” but finding it difficult to pick out specific notes in such a deeply integrated whiskey, dense with flavor and as balanced as an Olympic gymnast.
She explained that what we’re tasting was made from a batch of barrels containing whiskey fermented with an unusual yeast strain. The spirit took forever to mature — much longer than the client wanted to wait. But Fraley insisted. “Sometimes you’ve got to be patient,” says Fraley. “Just because you have it in stock doesn’t mean you have to use it.” After 18 years and a trip through some distinctive finishing barrels, she’s finally satisfied. I can’t tell you what the product was — it hadn’t been released yet, and it’s possible what I tasted wasn’t its final guise — but I can tell you that it was worth the wait.
