Klocke Estate

The Antidote to Commodification

The market-driven, mechanized world we live in has a tendency to turn almost everything into a commodity. An entrepreneur creates something new and differentiated. Customers respond and the business grows — but growth brings pressure to standardize and optimize. As investors and imitators pile on, differentiation erodes and the pressure to scale mounts. Craft gives way to machinery. Carefully sourced inputs are replaced by the lowest-cost alternatives. Personal relationships with customers become ticket queues.

There is tremendous collective benefit derived from this progression — lower cost goods and services accessible to larger groups of people, wealth created for the entrepreneur and their investors, jobs generated for the company’s employees.

But there’s also often costs — quality, relationships, negative social and environmental externalities that go ignored.

One antidote to that tendency towards commodification: Passion.

Meet John Frishkopf.

John’s career took him to Central Europe (Prague), where he fell in love with brandy. He found himself experimenting with his own production outside of his day job, and a vision began to take shape. What would a truly exceptional brandy, grown and produced in the US and reflective of that soil, taste like?

One step at a time, vision became reality. He found the right partner (in business and in life — Brett, who happened to have a PhD in engineering from MIT and experience running an agricultural operation), the right land (160 acres in Claverack, NY), and the right equipment (including a copper still shipped from France in 1,000 pieces that were reassembled by two French technicians). 

Director of Operations Caleb Gregg studied under Dan Farber (a founding partner, an expert in brandy, and the owner and operator of Osocalis Distillery in California) and began to cultivate the land for grapes and apples using regenerative organic methods. Nine varieties of grapes across 26,000 vines were planted, and 43 varieties of apples across 11,000 trees.

The result — Klocke Estate, open to the public since 2024 — is often jaw dropping. The growing operation and distillery is paired with a bar and restaurant, perched on top of a hill that yields some of the best views in the Hudson Valley. The interiors were designed by noted designer Ken Fulk (a former neighbor of John’s). Tours are often guided by John and Brett themselves; they live on the property with their dog, Juno, just at the base of the hill that visitors drive up on their way to the tasting room. White and red vermouths plus a limited selection of unaged fruit brandies are being served now (and are available for purchase online), while their flagship brandies continue to age in French oak barrels.

In the face of incentives that often result in less connection to place, more corners cut, and watered down commitment to quality, Klocke Estate cuts against the grain. In that way, their passion and commitment to the project is counter-cultural — an example of how craft and care can resist the market-driven drift towards commodification.  Walden’s partnership has been a natural fit. In John’s words:

“I think the reason that Walden is so effective as a bank is because it's not looking for a cookie cutter solution...Walden plays a really critical role in the financial ecosystem of agriculture and food production at the community level because it understands what's needed, it understands agricultural businesses and it understands entrepreneurs and the value add that they can bring."

Watch our video to learn more about Klocke Estate — their products, practices, and philosophy: