The social drinker

There is something soothing about drinks that are linked to places. Brands such as Cork Dry Gin or cocktails such as the Manhattan immediately evoke a feeling of place in one’s heart. Dublin has St James’s Gate and a few newly minted craft beers that are trying to capitalise on the capital, but there is no drink name yet that shouts Dublin, that is really redolent of our largest city.

This may change with Chinnery Dublin Dry Gin, which has hit the shelves as part of the flood of gin sloshing around as distillers cash in on our love affair with this spirit.

Chinnery is packaged in a beautiful bottle, replete with the strange warning that the “intemperate use of spirituous liquors dooms the body to disease and the intellect to decay and ruin”.

The gin markets itself as some sort heir to the tradition of George Chinnery, a Dubliner who apparently painted pictures of Cantonese traders and everyday life in 19th-Century Dublin.

While this back story is really nothing more than marketing nonsense, the good news is that this is a very pleasant gin indeed.

The combination of botanicals such as cassia bark and osmanthus flowers, along with oolong tea, makes for a very gentle and interesting gin.

The taste is clean and pure, and the quality of the distilling so good that this is a gin that you can sip happily without tonic, if you are that way inclined.

Quite why the distillers chose to name this gin after a painter from England who lived in Ireland for just two years is mysterious, until one thinks of George Chinnery’s fame in some of the wealthiest parts of Asia today. Perhaps this is a gin aimed at the Chinese market which will make Dublin famous to a new generation of drinkers overseas?