FIRST JOURNEYS - 80 GINS AROUND THE WORLD - PIN 73 OF 80
MATAROA GIN, Thessaloniki, Greece
AROUND THE WORLD, ONE BOTTLE AT A TIME,
PHILEAS FOGG WOULD SURELY APPROVE
Mataroa is distilled at Melissanidi Distillery, one of Greece's oldest distilleries. It was established in 1924 and is based in Aridaia, in northern Greece, close to the Kaimaktsalan mountain.
The third generation of the family is now involved in the business, which produces Ouzo Arhontiko, Tsipouro Arhontiko and Mataroa Mediterranean Dry Gin. Natural spring water from Kaimaktsalan is one of the key ingredients used by the distillery.
This gorgeous blue bottle is the colour of the sea and the botanical lineup certainly feels like a Mediterranean summer, when you can catch the scent of herbs and spices on the evening breeze.
The name comes from Mataroa, a passenger ship which travelled extensively around the world. Built by Harland & Wolff in Belfast, she was launched in 1922 as Diogenes and renamed Mataroa in 1926 when she was chartered for the New Zealand trade. She served as a troopship during the Second World War and then made two particularly remarkable journeys in 1945.
In August that year, she travelled from Marseille to Haifa carrying 173 Jewish refugee children, many of them survivors of the Buchenwald concentration camp, in a journey organised with the OSE. Later that year she carried Greek artists, academics and intellectuals from Piraeus to Taranto, helping them escape the political persecution and violence of the Greek Civil War period and ultimately reach France.
The ship was eventually scrapped in 1957, but its story lives on in the name of this Greek gin.
Mataroa Mediterranean Dry Gin was launched in 2019, taking its inspiration from the ship and the Mediterranean journeys it made. Its "cargo" is 12 botanicals from around the Mediterranean, including juniper, lemon and orange peel, mandarin, mastic, orris, angelica, liquorice, coriander, bay leaf, lavender and chamomile.
I love the idea that the bottle isn't just borrowing the name of a ship because it sounds exotic. Mataroa itself travelled through the Mediterranean and connected very different places and people, so the Mediterranean botanicals in the gin become a kind of cargo of their own.
There is also a lovely Greek connection in the botanical list. Mastic, the aromatic resin traditionally associated with the Greek island of Chios, sits alongside familiar Mediterranean herbs and citrus, while liquorice brings a little reminder of Greece's long association with aniseed spirits such as ouzo.
The blue bottle certainly completes the picture for me — it looks like it belongs beside the Aegean Sea.
I've served this as a G&T with Mediterranean tonic. I wasn't surprised to notice the liquorice quite upfront, particularly given Greece's love of ouzo, but with tonic it makes for a delicious, herbal and fresh G&T.
Of course, you need a side of Greek nibbles too!
"The Ship"
"Show me a bottle
and I'll tell you a story."