Region & History

Zuger Kirsch and Rigi Kirsch share a single set of production rules and are among the few Swiss spirits with a legally protected name. The Federal Office for Agriculture granted the AOP designation of origin on May 2, 2013, and it was entered into the register on September 2, 2013. Switzerland has only four spirit AOPs, and this Kirsch is one of them.

The protected area surrounds Lake Zug: the entire canton of Zug, plus nine municipalities in the canton of Schwyz on the Rigi and seven in the canton of Lucerne. Cherries here have a long history. Cherry pits from Roman times, dated between 170 and 270 AD, were found near Hagendorn, and written records confirm cherry cultivation in the canton of Zug from the mid-14th century onward.

It began with farmers and their own trees. According to the house, Johann Baptist Etter began processing the cherries from his Bergli farm in Menzingen starting in 1823. His son Paul founded the distillery in Zug in 1870 together with his wife Rosa, and it still operates today as a family business in its fourth generation.

Two other houses from the region reach back almost as far. In Brunnen on Lake Lucerne, Franz-Xaver Dettling founded a distillery for mountain cherries within his wine trading house in 1867, and Distillerie Fassbind in Oberarth, at the foot of the Rigi, names 1846 as its founding year.

Distilling in Switzerland falls under state supervision. Taxation and oversight lie with the Federal Office for Customs and Border Security, formerly the Swiss Alcohol Board. Home distillers may only process their own domestically grown raw materials, and anyone without their own still can have the distilling done for a fee. Today, several family-run operations around the lake bottle Kirsch whose origin is guaranteed by the AOP.