THE GIN PASSPORT ATLAS - DISTILLERY STORY- PINNED ON THE MAP - UK/ EUROPE
JAMES MAY GIN, Wiltshire, England, UK
James May has never struck me as the sort of person who would simply put his name on a bottle, smile for the photographs and let somebody else get on with the difficult bit. His gin rather proves the point. The idea started after he had bought half of his local pub, the Royal Oak in Swallowcliffe, and decided that making a gin for the pub sounded like a fairly straightforward little project. Naturally, it wasn't.
May had already experimented with gin while filming, including a day at Plymouth Gin, and the idea stayed with him. He wanted to make something a bit different rather than another conventional botanical gin, so the first proper experiment involved one of the most English ingredients imaginable: the humble parsnip. His reasoning was beautifully May-like. Parsnip reminded him of England, and Asian spices would give it a bit of excitement.
He teamed up with Hugh Anderson, a former Scots Guards officer who had become a distiller in rural Wiltshire. Anderson was working from a small, rather cold shed not far from May's cottage, and the two began experimenting with recipes. The original plan was to make enough for the pub, but Anderson suggested producing 1,000 litres — around 1,420 bottles — which was rather more gin than one village pub was likely to get through.
They put the first batch online as a signed and numbered limited edition. It sold out in a few days. None of it made it to the Royal Oak.
That was the point at which the joke became a business. The range grew, but the slightly bonkers approach to flavours remained. Asian Parsnip was followed by Navy Strength, London Drizzle and California Dreamgin', among others, with May continuing to come up with the ideas and Anderson working out how to turn them into something that could actually go into a bottle.
There have been ingredients along the way that sound more like the contents of a particularly inventive kitchen cupboard than a gin recipe, including mustard, gherkins, beetroot and, for California Dreamgin', girolle mushrooms and patchouli.
The original development work still happens in Wiltshire. May comes up with an idea, takes it to Anderson, and the pair experiment with it in the small test still before settling on a recipe.
Once they've agreed on it, the production has to move up a few gears. The recipe is scaled up at Thames Distillers in London, before the concentrated distillate is sent to Hampshire to be diluted, bottled and labelled. So although the gin begins life with two blokes standing around in a freezing shed, the final operation is considerably more complicated.
There is something particularly appropriate about Hugh Anderson being the man behind the still. Before distilling, he had served in the Scots Guards and worked in digital media, with a family connection to brewing and distilling through his great-uncle. He founded Downton Distillery in 2018, and what began as a small operation has since developed into a distillery on the Wiltshire Downs, where the landscape, local botanicals and conservation have become part of the wider story.
The distillery's current home is at Botley Farm, surrounded by vineyards and chalk downland, although James Gin's origins are firmly rooted in the much smaller shed where May and Anderson first started experimenting. It is a rather good reminder that celebrity gin doesn't always mean somebody has simply spotted a gap in the market and attached their name to it.
Sometimes a television presenter really does wander into a freezing shed with an idea involving a parsnip and accidentally creates a gin-fuelled monster.
"A freezing shed, a parsnip and James May's slightly questionable idea of fun."
Show me a bottle and
I'll tell you a story.
Photo credits: jamesgin.com
