EVOCATIVE GINS

The world is full of truly transportive gins that can evoke places, sensations and memories with just one sip

Emma explains how distilleries create a sense of time and place in their spirits

Of all of the senses that humans possess, I would argue that taste and smell make the strongest associations to a place or to a time. A whiff of wild garlic and I’m instantly back to exploring the woodlands as a kid with my brother, imperial leather soap reminds me of my grandparents’ house, and basil takes me back to my Mum’s discovery in the late 90s of a wondrous new jar that you simply added to pasta to create a tasty meal: pesto.

These kinds of associations trickled into my earlier gin tastings. What I now know as “heavy with coriander seed” reminded me of a wet dog, specifically one that had just been shampooed! Once, when tasting an in-development gin, Mum’s pasta discovery wouldn’t remove itself from my brain. Declaring “It’s pesto!” to a room full of bartenders led to a few confused looks at first, before it became evident that the gin in question counted basil and thyme among its botanicals.

I vividly remember a gin tasting when a client smelled angelica root, noted its dusty, musk-like odour, and said, “It smells like old churches.” She later revealed her parents made their own bootleg gin during World War Two that tasted like Christmas year round, as her mother simply added the spices that she had around the house for baking into the