High hopes for Marlborough Roots gin

Tainting their gin with fruit once seemed unimaginable for Elemental Distillers, but after two years of tinkering, they think they have found a winner.

On the back of winning the World’s Best London Dry at the 2023 World Gin Awards for its Roots Marlborough Dry Gin, head distiller and co-founder Ben Leggett said people kept asking when they would release a flavoured gin.

The company had always been a gin purist – almost a gin snob – when it came to the brand Roots, Leggett said, but with growing demand from suppliers and the public, the team decided it was time to take the plunge – albeit in their own way.

“We caved in and said, ‘Look, if we’re going to do a flavoured gin, we’re going to do it in our way, and we’re going to do it the Roots way’,” Leggett said.

The addition of oranges or strawberries would not do for Leggett, the drop needed to use grapes, and they needed to be of the pinot noir variety from Marlborough, to pay homage to their home.

“It was a question of how to create a gin that still remains a gin, but allows us to pay homage to this beautiful wine.”

That question took two years to answer. Leggett said he wanted something sophisticated, premium and boutique to match the devotion the distillery prided itself on, so simply steeping grapes as others had done was too easy.

“It’s like taking a bottle of vodka and putting some gummy bears in it, so the process is a very simple one, and a very cost-manageable one.

“We wanted to celebrate a fully-finished Marlborough pinot noir – which meant it was going to be bloody expensive.”

Leggett used a fortification process, similar to what was used to develop port and sherry, using the wine as a base and fortifying it with gin and gin concentrate to stabilise the wine, to keep it from oxidising.

Typically a fortification process brought the alcohol content up to about 14%, but to qualify as a gin by European standards, Leggett needed to raise it to at least 37.5%.

“If we went too high it takes away too much of the wine, and we don’t go high enough then it takes away too much of the gin, so trying to find the balance was not easy.”

Finally, he finished it off with a touch of off-dry sweetness to open up the juicy fruit notes to achieve what he hoped would be yet another award-winning sip for the brand.

“We’re really happy with the way it’s been received. Often you put too much time and thought into these things and you wonder if you’ve over complicated it when at the end of the day you could have just put grapes in it like everyone else,” Leggett said.

“But to see people absolutely fizzing about it, we’re really stoked.”

Leggett said he was keen to take Roots Rosso Vintage Pinot Noir Gin global, but due to grape-sourcing limitations, sharing the drop with the nation at Elemental Distillers’ new Gin Shack at the Vines Village and on Aotearoa’s shopping shelves was enough.

However he had high hopes for the World’s Best Flavoured Gin category at the World Gin Awards in 2025.

Elemental Distillers co-founder and head distiller Ben Leggett has spent two years at the distillery perfecting Roots Rosso.