Brian Stormont rounds up the latest news, releases and events for food and drink fans A DRINK FROM ISLE OF HARRIS

Award-winning apothecary and herbalist Amanda Saurin has launched an organic botanical infusion drink, hand

crafted from a selection of organic flowers, fruits, leaves and seaweeds, hand foraged on the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides.

Wild Eve Recipe no 1 is an innovative, small batch nonalcoholic drink that is rich and as intense as a really good alcoholic drink. It has heat, length and real complexity with that moreish desire to keep on sipping.

With the most extraordinary set of plants at the team’s disposal from mountain, machair meadow and sea, Amanda has used her learning from years of thinking, testing and coming to understand the best ways of extracting flavour, to craft her “magic in a bottle”.

Everything you taste in Wild Eve is pure plant, which is important not only because it means it is low in sugar, but plants offer the vitality and complexity that commercial extracts cannot. It’s only through the use of the actual plant that you can extract the full taste and active ingredients – for example rose, chamomile, oat and ashwagandha (the only

ingredient that can’t be grown on the Isle of Harris…yet), in combination make you feel relaxed and calm, they all have amazing properties and centuries of use as stress-busting, peace-inviting plants, as well as extracting beautifully into water.

The small local team that creates Wild Eve require time, skill and a vigilant eye to spy the perfect picking stage – often abandoning their work to rush out on a fine day to collect the harvest. The weather on Harris makes the process particularly challenging, the plants are slower to emerge from the cold ground, slower to reach maturity and then much faster to dash to seed.

The extracting processes are slow, gentle and considered, where each plant is handled carefully and respectfully.

This means Wild Eve will not be found anywhere demanding volume production including large supermarket chains. Instead, Wild Eve is boutique, created in small, sustainable batches, to be purchased directly with the distillers or through carefully selected stores that share their ethos.

Available now at Wild-Eve.com, £32, 50cl.

Wild Eve Recipe no 1 is available now.