A Gin Thing: On the hunt for gin botanicals

When I was little, my mum would send me off to the corner shop to buy penny sweets. I’d come back with a small paper bag full of mini Refreshers, Black Jacks, flying saucers and those cigarette-style sweets, which in hindsight were prime examples of the tobacco industry’s underhand marketing practices.

When David Winnard was little, his grandma used to send him out to pick mushrooms. He’d get a penny for common varieties, two pennies for uncommon varieties and five pence for the rare finds. It instilled in him a love of both the outdoors and wild ingredients, most notably fungi. No doubt he had brushes with the evocatively named turkey tail, the sheathed wood and the deadly galerina. Not your usual boyhood activities, it’d be fair to say – and again in hindsight, I know which experience I would have preferred.

Winnard has channeled this childhood passion into Discover the Wild, a foraging and wildlife photography school, that encourages safe and responsible foraging through events and species identification workshops. And he seems in his element, at ease in the downpour, as he escorts a group of us around the countryside somewhere in Rochdale on a, frankly, dismal day. He’s done stints on BBC Radio and appeared on Autumnwatch, and affably conveys his knowledge to people who, let’s assume, rarely stop to inspect nature. We huddle together to listen as he tells us there are 272 varieties of dandelion and over 500 species of bramble, or blackberry bushes, in the UK.

Why am I standing in a field, getting piss wet through, and staring more intently than ever at foliage and the sodden ground? It’s all to do with Caorunn Gin. No, I haven’t misplaced a bottle on some drunken jaunt into the woods. Today we’re actually on a mission – with expert help, mind – to find the five botanicals that contribute to the unique flavour profile of this Scottish spirit. And, yes, this is a PR exercise – but I just want to learn about the wildlife, maaaaan.   

So, specifically, we’re looking for rowan berries, heather, bog myrtle, dandelion and apple (the Coul Blush type, if we’re getting pedantic). Dandelion is easy. I’ve got that in my backyard. Rowan berries, the fruit of the mountain ash, are a distinctive orangey-red and are easy to spot against the washed-out surroundings. We find an apple tree not long into our hike and Winnard reveals that “apple seeds can revert to any tree in their ancestry.” Meaning, if you take the seed from a Granny Smith and plant it you might not get a Granny Smith tree! Mind ever so slightly blown. (Forgive the inaccurate example, true foragers). Heather, while emblematic of Scotland, turns out to be fairly common in these parts.

Bog myrtle is the truly elusive ingredient. In an undisclosed location, Winnard leads us to a patch, explaining that it’s prized by brewers and was widely used for flavouring beer before hops came on the scene. In line with the rules of foraging, you’re not supposed to pick too much of anything so he gives us a couple of leaves to pass around. We pinch them to release the oils; they give off a pungent, resinous scent that recalls a blend of rosemary, pine and insect repellent. If you can find bog myrtle, Winnard recommends making a syrup with the leaves. And theoretically, you can beef up a standard bottle of gin by putting judicious amounts of all these foraged ingredients in and letting them infuse. If you fancy the challenge, that is.  

All the botanicals found, Winnard dangles a parting secret in front of us: he tells us that there’s a fig tree somewhere in Manchester, but he won’t say where. His reluctance is part of an understandable fear that unscrupulous foragers would just decimate the supply. I divulge that my neighbour has a plum tree: nice in theory, less so in reality when the alleyway is a pool of festering mulch.  

Eager to take shelter from the rain, we are to head back to the urban sprawl and try some Carounn cocktails. Sadly, I miss this part but, hand on heart, I’d already tried some Caorunn concoctions in Barcelona, where Gin Tonic (the Spanish omit the ‘and’) has just gone a bit bonkers. We’re talking dedicated G&T bars where they have tiny cabinets full of botanicals for quick infusions. And while gin is often seen as an English spirit, the likes of Caorunn, Brecon from Wales, Death’s Door from the States and Gin Mare from Spain are showing that it’s not the case.

Not to sound trite but what I learned, besides apple genetics and how to recognise a hawthorn, is that there’s a wealth of natural ingredients – some of them dangerous, some of them, like fig trees, completely unexpected – all around us. Why not go looking?