An unusual, boozy export from Exeter farm is helping tell the story of Central Valley

Uniquely is a Fresno Bee series that covers the moments, landmarks and personalities that define what makes living in the Fresno area so special.

At 35 acres, Lindcove Ranch in Exeter is tiny.

It’s barely a speck of the more than 140,340 acres of citrus grown in Tulare County, which in turn produces about 40% of California’s citrus crop .

But it’s the one representing the central San Joaquin Valley in a bottle of gin that will be sold on shelves across the nation.

Valley Gin from St. George Spirits is a tribute to our region and its livelihood. Behind it is the story of a family who’s been farming for more than a century, hacking out their own path in a sea of massive farms whose fruit dominates grocery store shelves.

It’s also the story of a couple of Alameda distillers who got infected by the heady scent of orange blossoms one spring evening in Lindcove and were compelled to turn the experience into a gin.

Now those delicate orange blossoms on the farm have made their way into a gin that’s being sold nationwide. It debuted about two months ago and is available online and at most big liquor stores.

A launch party for the gin is scheduled for 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 18 at The Red Room , the bar inside Pardini’s on West Shaw Avenue. Bartenders from The Red Room, Annex Kitchen, Annesso and Michelangelo’s Pizzeria will have cocktails made with Valley Gin they invented for the event — and possibly later at their respective bars.

When Ryan Metcalf, bartender and beverage manager at The Red Room, tried the final product, he got psyched about the taste and reached out to the company. His team came up with eight new cocktails for the launch party.

“It’s very mellow in bite. It’s very silky and subtle,” he said. “It’s not gonna bite you back.”

Big farms and small

The Kirkpatrick family with Lindcove Ranch has farming roots that go back to 1905 when they first came to Lindsay. Patriarch John O. Kirkpatrick — whose initials are in the upper right-hand corner of the Valley Gin label — was literally a poster child for Sunkist oranges, his father snapping a photo of a 2- or 3-year-old Kirkpatrick in ripped coveralls holding an orange. The image won a Sunkist photo contest.

Kirkpatrick died in February 2023 and his son, Greg Kirkpatrick, has taken over the family farm. His mom Shirley has retired.

The farm is in the foothill community of Lindcove, (northeast of Exeter proper, though technically still within the city). Some may know it for its Main Squeeze Market (which recently closed) on Highway 198, a frequent stop for people headed to Three Rivers.

The farmers also sell their fruit at the Visalia Farmers Market (though they’re taking a break from it right now) and two Sacramento-area markets — Sunrise Mall Farmers Market and the Sacramento Certified Farmers Market at 8th and W streets.

Lindcove Ranch has been selling citrus and its blossoms to be made into alcohol for around 20 years. It used to be the main supplier of oranges for Hangar 1 Vodka’s mandarin blossom orange vodka .

Selling fruit or other crops used in alcohol, whether spirits or beer, isn’t unheard of.

Fresno’s Tioga-Sequoia Brewing Co. uses stone fruit such as peaches in its beers all the time. Wicked Harvest bourbon is infused with pistachios from the Valley and a vodka is made from sweet potatoes in Atwater.

But compared to the citrus industry as a whole?

“That is quite uncommon. That’s a pretty interesting, but small, niche of our industry sector,” said Tricia Stever Blattler, executive director of the Tulare County Farm Bureau.

Just shy of 50% of Tulare County’s crop of millions of pounds of oranges, lemons and grapefruit are exported outside the United States, much of it to Korea, Japan and other Asian countries. Some of it is squeezed into juice, but most gets torn apart with fingernails and eaten the old fashioned way.

“We are really known for being the fresh citrus capital of the world,” Stever Blattler said.

Giant farm companies do much of that exporting. Wonderful Citrus, for example, owns and manages around 70,000 acres of citrus, including the Halos brand of mandarins (in addition to Wonderful Pistachios, FIJI Water and other well-known brands).

But the Valley also has lots of small citrus growers, Stever Blattler said. It’s not uncommon to find farmers working 10 or 20 acres while still going to their regular day job, she said.

Lindcove Ranch

Lindcove Ranch is not your typical farm — and certainly not one of the big guys.

“Most people’s mantra is, ‘Get big or get out,’” Kirkpatrick said. “We’re quite the opposite. Our motto is, ‘De-commodify or die.’”

They focus on niche markets instead of big crops.

Lindcove Ranch’s “ultimate specialty” is the etrog citron . It looks like a bumpy, pointy lemon. It’s used in the Orthodox Jewish holiday of Sukkot , commemorating the 40 years when Jews wandered the desert. It’s used in a ritual where it and other plants are waved toward the four points of the compass.

The etrog is shipped all over the country for the holiday, including to one of the largest Orthodox Jewish communities in the world, in Lakewood, New Jersey.

The farm also once sold the leaves of the knobby green makrut limes for vodka. (They’re more commonly called kaffir limes, but the word is a racial slur used against Black people , especially in South Africa, so many are calling it by its Thai name instead.)

And now, the Valley Gin.

“I think it’s a great example of some out-of-the box thinking,” said Stever Blattler. “It really takes some innovation and entrepreneurship to differentiate yourself when you operates in a really, really big marketplace.”

Years ago, when the Lindcove Ranch farmers and the St. George distillers met — specifically Kirkpatrick’s father John and St. George founder Jörg Rupf — they connected instantly.

“As soon as we saw how incredibly enthusiastic about everything citrus he was, we knew we had found our sensei,” said master distiller Lance Winters. “It’s been a great and inspiring relationship ever since.”

When the elder Kirkpatrick died, Winters and head distiller Dave Smith came down for his celebration of life. The trip included a visit to the Lindcove Research and Extension Center , a sort of Willy Wonka-style research facility for citrus, that’s coincidentally across the street from the farm.

After, the distillers were serving Greg Kirkpatrick’s favorite cocktail — St. George Terroir gin with Star Ruby grapefruit juice from the farm. They were in the orange grove in the spring, the blossoms were in full bloom, and that perfume-worthy scent was rolling over everything. The distillers were hit with inspiration.

“It’s a very beautiful feeling. It’s a beautiful time of day,” Winters said. “That’s exactly the sort of place we like to draw for inspiration for a spirit.”

They decided to create a gin that would put them back in that moment.

Or, as Kirkpatrick tells it: “The creative, I guess, juices literally got flowing and they came down and said, ‘Hey, we really gotta do this in a big way.’”

Harvesting blossoms

So they did, incorporating not just oranges, but the delicate orange blossoms from Lindcove Ranch to get a light floral taste that’s much more nuanced than essential oils pulled from mature orange peels.

They also picked bergamot and Seville oranges; the peels used to make extracts used in the gin.

Early in the cool morning before the bees woke up, workers and distillers picked 1,000 pounds of Valencia, mandarin and tangelo blossoms. And since the tiny flowers are so delicate, this harvest took extra care.

Picture a worker with an old bucket strapped to his body, “literally just grabbing bunches of flowers when they’re in full bloom,” Kirkpatrick said.

It takes about an hour to pick a pound — maybe two or three pounds for the old pros if the tree is heavy with blooms.

The blossoms are collected in whatever plastic blue barrels or insulated totes they could find. They can start to compost almost immediately, so they spread them out as loosely as they can, and infuse the containers with argon gas to counteract the oxygen that oxidizes them.

The Kirkpatricks load the containers into their van and drive them the three hours to Alameda before the day even heats up. Within 15 or 20 minutes of their arrival, alcohol is being poured over the blossoms so they can infuse their flavor into the future gin.

It’s a lot of work, but it’s worth it, Winter said.

“When you smell it and when you taste it, you’ll realize all the time that goes into those blossoms is totally worthwhile.”

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