THE GIN PASSPORT ATLAS - DISTILLERY STORY- PINNED ON THE MAP - EUROPE
THE GARDENER GIN, France
Brad Pitt, a fifth-generation French wine family and a former Tanqueray master distiller walk into a gin project…
It sounds like the set-up for a particularly Hollywood drinks launch, but The Gardener has a surprisingly strong French connection behind it.
Pitt had already been working with the Perrin family, the winemakers behind Château de Beaucastel, through their partnership at Château Miraval. So when the idea of making a gin came along, there was already a relationship, a vineyard connection and, importantly, somewhere in the south of France worth exploring for inspiration.
The person brought in to make sense of it all was Tom Nichol, who spent more than four decades in the drinks industry and was global master distiller for Tanqueray. He had retired, so this wasn't exactly a case of someone wandering into a distillery and asking for the celebrity gin recipe.
Nichol went looking at what actually grows around the Riviera. A botanist surveyed the Perrins' southern French terroirs and apparently found around 140 different plants. Not all of them ended up in the bottle, thankfully, but it gave him plenty to investigate.
The final recipe is built around juniper, angelica, liquorice and coriander, with the Mediterranean character coming largely from fresh citrus. Bitter and sweet oranges and pink grapefruit grown around Vallauris are among the ingredients, along with botanicals associated with the Riviera.
This is where the name starts to make more sense.
The Gardener isn't trying to be another gin with “Provence” written on the label and a few lavender flowers thrown into the marketing. The idea is tied to the people who actually grow and cultivate the plants, and to the relationship between the Perrins and the land.
There is an interesting geographical twist, though. Despite its French Riviera identity, The Gardener isn't distilled on the Riviera. Production takes place in the Cognac area of Charente, at Distillerie de la Riviera, using a 2,500-litre Charentais copper still. The base spirit is organic wheat rather than grape spirit, despite the wine connection.
That seems worth knowing when you're looking at the bottle. The ingredients may have travelled from the Mediterranean, but the still is much further north.
And then there is the bottle itself, which is rather lovely. Pitt was involved in the design, with the textured glass intended to resemble the marks of a painter's brush. It gives the bottle a slightly tactile, almost sculptural feel rather than looking like a standard celebrity spirit with a famous name slapped across the front.
Pitt's own relationship with alcohol also became part of the story when the gin launched. He had been sober for several years and wasn't drinking at the time, which made the sight of one of Hollywood's biggest stars launching a gin rather more complicated than the usual celebrity drinks story. He has since said that he resumed drinking, although much more moderately.
If you are wondering why it is called The Gardener, rather than something more obviously Hollywood, perhaps that is the most interesting bit of all.
This one is supposed to be about the people who tend the land, not the person whose face gets recognised first.
"Hollywood glamour
meets French terroir"
Show me a bottle and
I'll tell you a story.
