THE SF GIN CHALLENGE 2020

What is it we love about gin? Curious imbibers will have their own reasons – and favourites. The Scottish Field Gin Challenge aims to be a compass for gin lovers of all kinds. Much like our well-established Whisky Challenge – which normally appears in the June issue – we appoint respected figures in the industry to sit on our panel and blind taste a fabulous array of gins. With 41 brilliant bottles to sample it’s not a bad gig, really.

On the panel this year are merchants Matthew MacFadyen and Robin Russell – both stalwarts of the Whisky Challenge. Caroline Fenneymore, store manager at Woodwinters Wine & Whiskies, also joins us this year, along with Ewan McIlwraith, owner of Robertsons of Pitlochry. And rounding off the panel we have whisky consultant and writer Blair Bowman.

It has been an incredibly tight competition this year. This is testament to the high standard of gins produced in this country.

We hope you enjoy looking through these exceptional gins and we encourage you to go out and taste some of them for yourself. Take a look at the next column for a bit more information on how the competition works.

Slàinte

Scottish Field Gin Challenge Team

Blind tasting

‘Our judges taste the gin completely blind’

What makes this competition unique and importantly, impartial, is that our judges taste the gin completely blind. With the branding and packaging completely stripped away, only the gin is left, to be judged solely on its own merits. At Scottish Field’s offices the 41 bottles were decanted into 10cl sample bottles with only a number for identification. These were then posted to the four participating judges for tasting and scoring.

Scoring

The judges were asked to award each of the 41 gins a mark out of five. We also asked the judges to provide us with detailed tasting notes.

The results

Once all the judges’ scores were in, we separated the gins into their relevant categories to find the winning bottles in the Over £30 and Under £30 categories, along with the winners in the Outside of Scotland and Flavoured categories. As the results of the challenge were extremely close this year, we have also listed the top 12 highest scoring gins.