A field guide to Scottish botanicals

Every gin has juniper in it, because otherwise it is not gin. What distinguishes one from another is the six or ten or twenty-two other things in the still, and in Scotland a striking number of those are gathered rather than bought.

That is partly marketing and partly geography. Scotland has a lot of coast, a lot of moor, and not much intensive agriculture on either, which means the things growing there are genuinely wild and genuinely local. A distillery on Jura or in Wester Ross can walk to its botanicals. One in a Midlands industrial estate cannot.

The moor gives heather — honeyed, dry, slightly dusty, out in August — and bog myrtle, which smells resinous and faintly medicinal and has been going into Scottish drinks since long before gin existed. The hill gives rowan berry, sharp and bitter, from the tree traditionally planted by the door to keep harm out. The pine forest gives Scots pine, as needles or as tapped sap, which is close enough to juniper to push it further rather than argue with it.

The coast is where it gets genuinely distinctive. Sugar kelp and carrageen, hand-cut from sea lochs, bring real salinity — not a suggestion of sea air but actual salt on the finish. Sea buckthorn, off the east coast dunes, is sour enough to do the job of citrus without being citrus. These are the botanicals that most clearly put a specific place in the glass, and they are the reason island gin tastes like island gin.

One caution about the word “local”. Wild Scottish juniper is in genuine trouble — the stands are old, they are not regenerating well, and there is a long-running conservation effort to replant them. A distillery making its gin with Scottish-grown juniper is doing something difficult and rare, and says so loudly. Most Scottish gin, entirely reasonably, uses imported juniper and gathers everything else at home.