So
I'm taking part in this small, hand-crafted, guided tour of the
Sipsmith's distillery in West London - Sipsmith being the
award-winning London gin company which started only a few years ago,
but which has already become one of the
defining spirits manufacturers - and I have one of my hugely
unreliable personal epiphanies, the gist of this one being, I
am going to drink gin and nothing but, for the rest of my life.
Not
hard to see why, of course. The tour is being adminstered by a bright
young dude who works for Sipsmith's, and who breaks off every six
minutes to say, 'Okay guys. Time for another tasting. Who'd like to
try some of our fantastic damson vodka?'
I
can barely get the word yes
out fast enough. Each tasting snifter is sweeter than the last, even
the room-temperature standard London Gin with nothing in it, a drink
I would have thought undrinkable in the modern world. But no,
Sipsmith's stuff is so finely-wrought that it fills me with warmth
and well-being, like a TV Christmas Special. Not only that, but the
distillery is really just a couple of large rooms in an anonymous
shed, and one of these rooms is completely dominated by three large
and intensely dramatic stills, all burnished copper and caressable
steel, and they have names:
Prudence,
Patience
and Constance.
It is like a fairly-tale, or, even better, The
Big Rock Candy Mountain.
I am in a state of Prelapsarian happiness, and at times like these,
decisions are made, life choices insist on articulating themselves
and before you know it, I am about to turn my back on the World of
Wine and devote myself entirely to the great-tasting World of Gin,
where, as a happy by-product, I can support a local business and
consume something which is authentically London,
the
greatest city in the world.
But
it's not just the fabulous taste, nor the atmosphere of quietly
tolerant hedonism in a patch of backstreet light-industrial which is
so appealing. It's - I can't avoid the word - the alchemy
of the gin process which really turns me on. After all, the stuff's
made from a very basic grain alcohol, which comes in bulk through the
front door, but which is then transmuted by the actions of the
frankly filmic Constance
or whoever, plus a magical admixture of botanicals and aromatics,
into an elixir. Which then generously lends itself to further
transformations - with basic mixers; in scores of cocktails; into
playful infusions. There is a wall at Sipsmith covered in small
carboys, each containing a trial concoction of gin + herbs, or
flowers, or fruit, each silently glowing container a monument to the
human imagination. The Sipsmith pranksters even used their old
Christmas tree
to distill a new flavour. You try that with a Chassagne Montrachet. It is all about possibilities, re-inventions, freedom.
And
the stuff doesn't even go off once you've opened it.
Won't
I miss the profligate variety and dismal snobberies of the World of
Wine? Not much. Over the course of my Sipsmith's evening, I had a
world-class G & T made with lime and Fever-tree tonic; the neat
gin; that damson vodka (one of their adorable sidelines); and, to
round it off, a mesmerising Dry Martini, made by the bright young
dude (who is, I should confess, a family friend, but, even allowing
for that handicap, is still a bright young dude). This last drink
generated such a sense of existential clarity that I can access it even now,
some weeks later. There is a gin for every occasion, in other words;
and I wasn't even hungover in the morning, certainly not with that
listless cosmic dread which can follow an evening of wine. There's even a quiet internal narrative harmony: a few years ago,
PK and I stumbled upon Sipsmith's gin at a wine fair, when it was
still cheeky and relatively unknown. And we said, This
is good,
so good that PK actually gave me a bottle for Christmas. This latest
encounter is therefore another moment in a long-term, deepening gin
relationship, a juniper-scented love that will see me through into old age and the
grave, where my fragrantly pickled corpse will resist the earthworms and centipedes for decades.
There
remain only three small problems. First, Sipsmith gin is sublime, but
it costs around £28.00 a bottle; Fevertree Tonic comes in at 75p
per 200ml. Aldi, on the other hand, do a bottle of what claims to be
London Dry Gin for just under a tenner, plus a litre of tonic for
37p. Clearly, corners will have to be cut, sooner rather than later.
Secondly,
the question of drinking neat gin at room temperature: the last time
I saw this done (apart from by a load of breathless enthusiasts in
the Sipsmith distillery) was in the 1958 Anglo-American
tweed'n'turnups classic Gideon of Scotland Yard,
starring Jack Hawkins. Generations have gone by since gin was warm,
and It will take time to properly re-integrate tepid London Dry into
modern society. There is still something perverse about it, like
wearing a jacket indoors.
And
thirdly, there is the question of the entire case of crotch-grabbing
Californian Shiraz so generously gifted to me at Christmas by my
Father-in-law, plus five or six mixed reds and whites, all left over
from the New Year. They will have to be dealt with in the appropriate
manner, and dealt with severely. And then the gin awaits. Give me a
couple of weeks; three, then. That's all I'm asking.
CJ
Gifted (dread word!)
ReplyDelete...Actually, I can see two issues here. There could be a problem with using the word 'gift' as a verb (a recent colloquialism which some people are happy to get along without); and with the idea that Californian Shiraz is a gift at all - that it is in fact, rather more of a punishment than a present. I'm open to persuasion on both counts...
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