JOHN LAWRENCE

Bottoms up: Luc Morel, gin sommelier at Britain's first dedicated gin bar at The Feathers Hotel in Woodstock, near Oxford

Forget ice and a slice – the new super-premium gins are much too interesting to be drowned in tonic. David Gerrie reports on a new spirit of adventure

It was Sir Winston Churchill who famously declared the only way to make the perfect gin martini was to pour a liberal amount of the chilled spirit into an equally frigid and correctly-shaped glass, pop in a couple of olives and show the glass to the vermouth bottle on the mantelpiece. So it is, perhaps, only fitting the nation's first dedicated gin bar should open just a juniper berry's throw from Blenheim Palace, the place of his birth.

Here, one can sample "The Ultimate G&T", which uses Blackwood's 60 per cent, which claims to be the world's only vintage gin, and Q tonic, featuring hand-picked cinchona bark (quinine) from the Peruvian Andes and organic agave - albeit at a wallet-busting £16.75-a-pop.

In any other year, this could be seen as merely another gimmicky splash in the glass from the spirits and leisure industries ever eager to find new ways to persuade us to part with our booze dollar. But the fact that The Feathers, in the charming Cotswold village of Woodstock, Oxfordshire, has managed to gather no fewer than 50 gins from eight different countries and has installed a "Gin Ambassador" in residence to guide the less sophisticated gin drinker through their menu, is as good a sign as any that the intensely aromatic spirit has come a long way since it was 18th Century London's crack cocaine of its day. back then, it was drunk not only like water, but instead of it due to the potentially lethal qualities of Adam's Ale at that time.

Others are following suit. London's Harvey Nichols has opened a martini terrace on its fifth floor until the end of July. The truth is the days of your only choice being whether you want your gin in a green, blue or clear bottle are long gone. The rise and rise of vodka as the fashionable drink has at last seen gin distillers responding in a remarkable and highly profitable manner.

 

THE INDEPENDENT, Wednesday, 12 May 2010