GIN OF THE VINE GINNED!
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EDITORS’ NOTE There are those of us that fail to learn from history and are doomed to repeat it. There are others who do learn from history and thrive on repeating it, particularly when that history is a bit obscure. The entrepreneurs behind our June Gin of the Month, Chilgrove Dry Gin, fall into that second category. In researching their gin, they found a littleknown twist in our favourite spirit’s history that led them to develop a recipe unique amongst UK craft gins: they discovered that the first gins were made from grapes. One of our objectives in starting the Craft Gin Club was to provide our Members with distinctive gins such as Chilgrove, gins that not only please the palate but also boost the brain. In this edition of GINNED! we took advantage of Chilgrove’s grape-based history to help you understand gin’s background in more detail whilst also exploring the grape-based wine market including the up and coming English wine market. Of course, another of our objectives is to deliver our Members gins of the highest quality, an area in which Chilgrove is excelling: the gin from the South Downs has won three medals at spirits competitions in just the past few months. So when you take your first sip of Chilgrove Dry this month, know that you are tasting English innovation at its finest, innovation learned from a history Jon Hulme John Burke Co-Founder Co-Founder known only to the most dedicated jon@craftginclub.co.uk john@craftginclub.co.uk gin fans of which you are one.
Cheers!
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GINNED! Magazine JUNE 2015
VOL. 8
GINTRODUCTION p. 5… Gin of the Vine p. 11… Craft Companions p 18… The Gin & Distillers’ Pour p 20… Cocktails for all Seasons
FEATURES p. 30… Gin & Wine: a history p. 36… Original Gin Recipes p 41…
A Fantastic Fine Wine Fraud
p 46…
Warming up to English Wine
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GIN OF THE VINE
“But I say unto you, I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom.� Jesus Christ, The King James Bible, Matthew: 26:29
At the Last Supper, the night before he met his fate towards the end of the Passion, Jesus Christ toasted the fruit of the vine with the people he loved. The cup was passed, the wine was shared and the fruit of the vine itself was fated to become an integral part of the Christian celebration. Two thousand years on and two thousand miles away, the fruit finds its fate at the center of a different celebration, a celebration in the tiny West Sussex hamlet of Chilgrove, a celebration between people in love that share a common passion: a celebration of gin. For in this hamlet live Christopher Beaumont-Hutchings and his wife Celia, the couple behind the Craft Gin Club’s June 2015 Gin of the Month, Chilgrove Dry Gin, a spirit spawned from their passion, a spirit that shares in the fate of the fruit, a spirit that is a Gin of the Vine. FROM DOWN UNDER TO THE SOUTH DOWNS If fate were perfect, Celia and Christopher would have met in Bristol during their student years - they both attended the city’s university at the same time. But as fate prefers to tease us with its twists, the ginlovers fell in love in a place quite the opposite of Bristol: Sydney, Australia. A geologist by diploma and financier by trade, Christopher moved to Sydney to follow his merchant banking career he started in the City after uni while Celia, a medical doctor, found herself passing through Sydney via Perth where she had been living at the time they met. As not long after Celia moved back to the UK, the two began their romance on opposite ends of the globe with Christopher making the long journey back home once every few months.
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On one of those journeys, they popped into the White Horse Pub in Chilgrove - recently named the UK’s best pub in this year’s GQ Magazine British Food & Drink Awards - for a couple of G&Ts. Conversation quickly turned to their shared passion for gin. By the end of their chat in the White Horse, Christopher and Celia had planted the seeds of the vine that has since blossomed into Chilgrove Dry Gin. With Christopher still in Sydney full-time, the South Downs Duke and Duchess of juniper collaborated remotely on the business plan before Celia, free of commitments in the UK, joined Christopher in Sydney where they turned their dream into a business plan. After six months of crunching numbers, determining the best production strategies and studying the rapidly growing craft spirits movements, Christopher decided it was time for a break from banking and the couple returned to the UK to put their gin fantasies into action. In their preparation, Christopher and Celia quickly realised that there is much more to a spirits brand than just a business plan, particularly for craft spirits: the story behind the gin as well as its unique selling point can make or break a new brand. For Chilgrove, the story almost wrote itself. Celia comes from a family of mixed nationalities: her father is English whereas her mother is Dutch. Coincidentally, gin shares a similar history as it arrived in England as jenever during the days of William of Orange and the Glorious Revolution from Holland, a very direct association with Chilgrove. What’s not as direct an association yet one that makes complete sense is Christopher’s background. During his geology studies 7
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at university, Christopher spent a lot of time familiarising himself with the field of climatology which as it turns out is also closely linked to the history of gin and the grapes that when distilled form Chilgrove’s base spirit.
gins with grape spirits, the soon-to-be-married couple had found their unique selling proposition.
If it hadn’t been for a period that climatologists call the Little Ice Age beginning around the turn of the 14th Century and lasting for some 550 years, gin and jenever as we know them today - made with grain distillates - may not have come to exist. The Little Ice Age was characterised by colder climes in Northern Europe, climes that affected the area’s agriculture. Whereas vineyards were abundant in the Low Countries prior to the historical cooling due to a period of warmer weather referred to as the Medieval Warm Period which lasted the three hundred years to 1250, the fragility of grape vines meant they could not survive the onset of colder weather. Simultaneously, distillers in the region where the Netherlands and Belgium lie today switched from creating distillates from wines to spirits made from grains.
But how does one go about making a gin from grapes in the UK if it has never been done before? A difficult question that the pair found had a difficult answer.
In their research, Christopher and Celia found evidence that the history of jenever followed this climatological pattern - the first distilled juniper spirits started with grape-based distillates and thus, the history of gin begins with grapes as well. Realising that this was a little known fact and that no other distillers in the UK were making 8
VINDICATING THE VINE
In preparing their recipe, Christopher and Celia researched and tasted over one hundred gins with distinct botanical combinations, little by little discovering their favourites and the botanicals those favourites had in common. In this manner, they were able to establish a shortlist of twenty herbs, fruits and spices that most represented the style of gin they were after; a style in which none of the botanicals are emphasised over others, one not overly citrusy nor spicy, and one made with classic English gin botanicals. But nobody, not even the professors at the Institute of Brewing & Distilling where Christopher took a class, could determine how these botanicals would work in a grape-based spirit. They simply had to test it out to know for sure. To conduct the tests, they turned to the experts at Thames Distillers and their Master Distiller hailing from a long family line of proud English spirits-makers, Charles Maxwell.
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After having begun experimentation with their twenty shortlisted botanicals in a grain spirit and determining the mixture that would work best, Maxwell and his team switched out the grain spirit for its grape cousin, not really knowing how it would turn out. “It was completely different,” explained Christopher. “The way in which the botanicals reacted with the grape spirit caused us to have to switch out several ingredients, substitute them with others and retry different combinations.” For instance, in the grape spirit, the lemon they used in the original recipe “didn’t have the citrus punch” they sought and so they experimented with a species of lime to achieve the desired citrus effect. After running a number of test recipes, the final mix was found. Bobal, Airen, and Tempranillo grapes are sourced from La Mancha region of Spain, pressed, fermented and distilled to 97.3%, a powerful distillate which goes into the still with natural mineral water from Chilgrove - 50% spirit, 50% water - and the gin’s eleven botanicals. The heads and tails of the resulting spirit - those not suitable for consumption - are separated from the heart which is then bottled as Chilgrove Dry Gin. The whole process - sourcing the grapes, landing on the botanical mixture, experimenting on mini stills, Bunsen burners and test tubes went relatively quickly. After beginning testing in the autumn of 2013, Chilgrove Dry Gin with its grape-based spirit and eleven final botanicals in place was ready for launch on June 14th 2014, the date conveniently on which World Gin Day also fell. 9
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THE FATE OF THE GRAPE Since its launch, the Chichester area’s first gin has garnered praise in the super-premium category at inter national competitions, taking home a silver medal at the 2015 San Francisco World Spirits Competition, a silver medal at the 2015 World Spirits Awards and a bronze at the 2015 International Spirits Challenge. The ambitious now-married craft gin power couple has successfully exported Chilgrove to Canada, France, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands and Belgium and are working on even more markets. But Chilg rove’s popularity remains very strong at its home base. In one local spirits shop, the first batch of Chilgrove to arrive on its shelves sold out in five hours. Spirits expert and gin reviewer David T. Smith who lives not far from Chilgrove has called the gin “an exemplary use of grape spirit� whose “botanical flavours are well-defined and can be easily 10
picked out.â€? The team at the White Horse pub supports Chilgrove through its G&T menu with the UK’s Best Pub’s Manager Niki Burr saying that the gin “has put Chilgrove on the map.â€? With such success in under one year since the launch of their grape-based baby, Christopher and Celia are developing other recipes including a “terroir tonicâ€? made with the same local water with which they distill their gin, a recipe envisaged to be the perfect complement to the botanicals in their gin as they are the perfect complement to one another. When they bumped into each other that day in Sydney, Christopher and Celia had not seen their fate, their gin being but a distant dream. But with a shared passion, a beautiful love story and a unique spirit with an amazingly successful launch, their fate seems already written, a fate which will have people around the world celebrating the tiny hamlet of Chilgrove and its Gin of the Vine. đ&#x;?¸ GINNED! Magazine vol. 8
Craft Companions
During the development of Chilgrove Dry Gin, Christopher and Cecila had each other for support through the ups and downs of entrepreneurship. But they also had help from outside from a number of people that believed in their project and the couple themselves. The Craft Gin Club spoke with three of the partners that have accompanied Christopher and Celia on their gin journey to learn more about their work with Chilgrove as well as their thoughts on the UK’s craft movement. 11
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Fentimans Botanically Brewed Beverages
Fentimans Botanically Brewed Beverages got its start in 1905 when a recipe for a ginger beer was left to iron worker Thomas Fentiman in exchange for a loan. When the loan was never repaid, Thomas became the proprietor of the recipe and began delivering his brew via horse and carriage to the town folk of Cleckheaton in West Yorkshire. As its popularity grew, so did the company which continues to be “Faithful to the Originals.� The Craft Gin Club spoke with Tiffany McKirdy, Fentimans Operations Director, about how the craft mixer brand is accompanying the craft gin boom. 12
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1. How have you stayed true to your original recipes over the years whilst keeping up with new trends? With an authentic heritage dating back to 1905, we consider Fentimans to be the original adult soft drink. Over time, we have always maintained the integrity of our recipes using only natural ingredients. The search for these natural ingredients is at the heart of o u r r e s e a r c h a n d development programme and drives our innovation. For example, one of our most recent launches was Rose Lemonade made with rose oil from the worldfamous Kazanlak R o s e Va l l e y i n Bulgaria. What sparked the idea is t h a t o u r ow n e r, Eldon Robson, great-grandson of Fentimans’ founder Thomas Fentiman, came across bowls of rose petals while dining at the Cinnamon Club in London. The petals were actually condiments so we thought if you can eat rose petals at dinner, surely we could make a refreshing drink with them. 2. What effect has the shift towards quality, artisanal products in the UK had on Fentimans? 13
Our dedication to natural ingredients and our heritage have led to consistently buoyant sales for more than a decade driven by an increasingly educated public that is developing a taste for a unique and healthy alternative to the usual carbonated soft drinks. One area where we have had substantial success with our range of botanically brewed mixers led by our tonic water is in cocktails at quality bars and restaurants. To emphasise this trend, we are embarking on a series of Fentimans Friday events in which we will be filming carefully crafted cocktails in a variety of upmarket cocktail bars in London and other major UK cities. 3. How does Chilgrove Dr y Gin fit into your strategy? We enjoy very much working with Christopher and Celia at Chilgrove. Whenever they do an event, Fentimans accompanies their tastings such as their upcoming involvement in the Cowes Week yacht races. What’s more, our mixers go amazingly well with Chilgrove, particularly our Ginger Beer which Christopher loves in a Bright n’ Breezy, and our light tonic whose grapefruit notes complement Chilgrove’s lighter style of gin.
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Thames Distillers Charles Maxwell
Christopher and Celia called on Charles Maxwell at Thames Distillers to help them bring their dream of Chilgrove Dry Gin to life. Maxwell is an eighth-generation distiller - spirits have been running through his family bloodline since the 17th Century. He launched Thames Distillers in 1996 and now makes and bottles gins for over 60 brands from large international brands to those for local bars - in the distillery’s two 500-litre stainless steel stills, Tom Thumb and Thumbelina. The Craft Gin Club spoke with Maxwell, who was given a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Gin Guild, about craft gins. 14
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1. Why is gin experiencing such a burst in popularity in recent years? Vodka has done so well for so long but the differences amongst vodkas are very nuanced and quite small. With gin you get real differentiation from one brand to the next. Take the gins that have been instrumental in bringing the category back into the mainstream. You first had Bombay Sapphire which started pulling people back from vodka and then you have Hendrick’s which really blew the door off. The two gins are completely different in taste and texture as well as in marketing. When the main players in the market invest in marketing and begin to get the on-trade on board, a serious interest begins to develop. Drinks are a conversation piece so when you get bartenders telling the stories behind gins the buzz perpetuates. It’s also helps that gin is made for mixing in cocktails although there are one or two sipping gins as well. 2. What do you think of the craft distilling boom? The big brands are great because you can go into any bar in the world and know that you can order a quality product. But people in the West are certainly turning away from these big brands seeking out something quirky. What’s wonderful about the craft distilling boom is 15
that you know you’ll get something of quality as well, something that’s not dangerous as we have rules in place to ensure that products are made to high standards. The nature of gin - the fact that it’s relatively quick to make once your recipe is locked down and that it does not have to be aged and stored - makes it an attractive proposition for entrepreneurs. As long as they get their marketing down right, I think this trend will continue. Sure, some people get into it with rose glasses and there will be a couple of secondhand stills on the market eventually, but it’s just like any other business. A lot of the smaller brands will carry on serving their regions and will be very happy doing so while some might become international brands if they have the ambition to be so. 3. How is Chilgrove Dry Gin distinct from other gins that you have worked with? The grape spirit was a pleasure to work with. It has different characteristics from the grain spirits we usually use for premium gins and we had to adjust our recipe accordingly in order to create alliances between the botanicals and the grape spirit. Ultimately, we have created a gin that has an enhanced smoothness due to the grape base as well as a crispness and nice citrus note. I keep a bottle of Chilgrove at home for personal use and my daughter is a huge fan. GINNED! Magazine vol. 8
The White Horse Pub & Inn
The White Horse Pub & Inn dates back to the 16th Century when it started out as a coaching inn. It has since remained a pub and inn albeit under different management throughout the years. The current management which bought the pub two years ago has decorated it in urban chic with a country feel which attracts lots of hunters in shooting season. In April, The White Horse was awarded the title of the UK’s Best Pub at the GQ Food & Drink awards. The Craft Gin Club spoke with the pub’s Manager, Niki Burr, about the trend towards top quality food and drink in the UK. 16
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1. How has the shift towards top quality food and drink affected the UK pub industry? For starters, the pub scene in particular is on the up and up. Whereas people used to go to restaurants and nice hotels when they were in search of a fine dining experience, now they’re switching over to pubs. You could even say that restaurants are being overtaken by the pub scene. This has been spurred by the rise in gastropubs serving better quality and innovative dishes as well as by the likes of Tom Kerridge whose pubs are earning Michelin stars. Food and drink in the UK is only going to get better. 2. How does the White Horse reflect this trend towards quality? One of the most important points driving the pub scene is the growth of amazing products coming out of the UK particularly in the drinks arena. British craft beers are well established but craft 17
spirits and wines are not far behind. We support several British spirits brands gaining huge followings such as Chase and Sipsmith and work with local Sussex wineries. All of our food is sourced locally: we have lobster and fresh fish from the coast; venison, pheasant and partridge during the shooting season; and our pork comes from a farm right down the road from neighbours of ours we speak to on a regular basis. A lot of pubs in the UK say that they’re local but really aren’t. We’re as local as it gets. 3. How do you work with Chilgrove Dry Gin? Brands like Chilgrove are exactly the type of local brands we love to work with - we put our heart into the gin when we learned it was first being made. We have a G&T menu on which Chilgrove features prominently. When guests to our hotel come in from out of town, they want to drink locally made spirits so we can now give them Chilgrove which is great. We’re situated in such a small hamlet that Chilgrove Dry Gin is really putting us on the map! đ&#x;?¸ GINNED! Magazine vol. 8
Botanicals 1. Juniper 2. Coriander seed 3. Angelica root 4. Orris root 5. Liquorice 6. Grains of paradise
7. Sweet orange 8. Bitter orange 9. Key lime 10. Summer savoury 11. Wild water mint
Tasting Notes from Master Distiller Charles Maxwell The neutral grape spirit base helps to give a soft mouth feel and bring forward floral notes as it combines with the citrus botanicals. Overall there is a gentle delivery of the botanical flavours which end up with a spicy peppery note delivered by the grains of paradise working with the juniper. Chilgrove is a big, powerful, complex gin that is seriously smooth with a superb length.
Distillers’ Pour
Bright n’ Breezy • • • •
2 measures Chilgrove Dry Gin 2 lime wedges, squeezed 4 dashes Angostura bitters Fentimans Ginger Beer
Method: Add ingredients to a Collins glass. Stir well. Top up with chilled soda water. Garnish with a lime wedge
Cocktails for all Seasons
Chilgrove Dry Gin is otherwise known as “The Gin for all Seasons� and Christopher and Celia tailor their classic cocktails according to the season. In the summer they enjoy a Chilgrove G&T garnished with a sprig of English mint followed in the autumn by the Chilgrove Fizz topped off with English sparkling wine. The cold of winter requires the soothing warmth of the Chilgrove Dry Martini with three parts gin to 1/2 part vermouth decorated with a lemon peel 20
twist and as the birds begin to chirp in the springtime, the gin baron and baroness enjoy a Chilgrove Collins trimmed with a lime wedge. In the following pages we look at four not-so-classic cocktails made specifically for Chilgrove Dry Gin along with some fun stories about seasons of all kinds, seasons related to Chilgrove in ways more twisted than your citrus peel garnish. GINNED! Magazine vol. 8
Sincerity for all Seasons “The gin for all seasons,” Chilgrove Dry Gin’s slogan, mirrors the title of one of the most successful works of the modern era, Robert Bolt’s A Man for all Seasons. Originally a radio play written for the BBC, A Man for all Seasons follows the conscience of Thomas More who as Lord Chancellor to Henry VIII refused to give in to pleas from his contemporaries to accept the King’s desire to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon in order to marry Ann Boleyn with whom he had fallen in love and with whom he sought to have a male heir. More believes that he will be damned to hell by contradicting his integrity whereas the play’s other main characters including Henry VIII - are portrayed as lacking integrity. Bolt, who had a minor obsession with Thomas More’s plight from a young age, focused on the subject of man’s integrity in a number of his works. He wrote the screenplay and received an Oscar nomination for the lauded film Lawrence of Arabia in which the title character is torn between allegiance to his native England and the Arabs with whom he fights during World War I. In his screenplay for Dr. Zhivago, Bolt portrays the romantic title character as torn between two woman as well as the ideology expressed in his poetry that runs counter to Russia’s encroaching Communism after the Bolshevik Revolution. 21
The playwright himself exhibited his own integrity in one of the Twentieth Century’s most tense ideological struggles, the debate over the proliferation of nuclear weapons. A signatory member of the Committee of 100, an activist group of actors and celebrities that opposed the nuclear arms race, Bolt participated in the September 1961 sit-down at Trafalgar Square, a peaceful demonstration that took place against the decree of the British government and at which more than 1,300 protesters were arrested, amongst them Bolt. Like Thomas More who refused to give into his principles and was ultimately executed for treason, Bolt refused to sign a document stating that he would no longer participate in such anti-nuclear protests and spent a month in prison because of his refusal. More integrity, More problems
The treasonous Lord Chancellor would not, however, have approved of the integrity of Bolt’s personal life. As More refused to concede to Henry VIII’s desire to divorce his first wife, he similarly would have questioned Bolt’s marital decisions. The playwright was married four times, albeit twice to the same woman, actress Sarah Miles, who nursed the Oscar and BAFTA winner after a stroke left him partially paralysed in 1979 until his death in 1995. How’s that for integrity? GINNED! Magazine vol. 8
A Bolt of integrity? A paralysed playwright and his BAFTA-nominated nurse and muse.
Pink Admiral • • • • •
50ml Chilgrove Dry Gin 30ml Lillet Blanc 15ml fresh lemon juice 15ml sugar syrup 3 dashes Peychauds bitters
Method: Combine all ingredients and shake with ice. Serve in a chilled long-stemmed coupe glass and garnish with a twist of orange peel 22
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A S.A.D start to the Season of Little Light About 14 miles southeast of the tiny hamlet of Chilgrove, the home of Chilgrove Dry Gin, and 30 miles west of Brighton sits the seaside resort town of Bognor Regis, a town which claims the formidable distinction of being the “sunniest town in the UK”. With 1,900 hours of annual sunlight and a comfortable temperature range, Bognor Regis is a favourite place to take in the sun for commoners and kings alike, as George V recovered from surgery at Bognor at which time the town became “of the king.”
South Africa, began to experience signs of depression. Finding others like him, Rosenthal postulated that his gloomy mood was due to a lack of sunlight, an absence that he filled with the sun’s artificial equivalent. He ran control group tests which showed that after several days of 30 to 60 minutes of exposure to light boxes, test group patients began to feel better.
Light therapy as a treatment for S.A.D. seems to make sense as it is known that the level of exposure to sunlight affects Alas, if only the rest of the UK the body’s levels of melatonin, the experienced the same sunlight as Bognor hormone that controls our sleep cycle, and Regis the country’s population might not serotonin, which is widely believed to have be as prone to the recently diagnosed a significant impact on our overall moods. malady, Seasonal Affective Disorder, also To this effect, the Dana Centre at known as the winter or summer blues. London’s Science Museum set up a Light With such lighthearted nicknames, you The sun sets on the UK’s sunniest town Lounge in 2006 (see image next page) for may not at first glance believe the disorder S.A.D. sufferers. Still, light therapy has not to hold serious implications for its sufferers, but indeed it does lead to been clinically confirmed as the definitive treatment for S.A.D, depression in those affected at certain times of the year - with winter treatments which today range from anti-depressants to exercise. causing more cases than summer - and for some even leads to suicide. Over 500,000 Britons are estimated to succumb to the depressive We like to think that a glass or two of Chilgrove Mulled wine would be disease whose acronym, fittingly, is S.A.D. enough to perk anyone up during the dark winter months. But then again, our degree is in gin-ology, not psychology like Dr. Rosenthal. S.A.D. was first diagnosed in 1984 by doctor Norman Rosenthal who, Whose professional medical opinion you choose is up to you. upon his move to a dark and wintery New York from his native sunny 23
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Simulated Sunbathing The light at the end of the S.A.D tunnel?
Chilgrove Mulled Wine • • • • • • • •
150ml Chilgrove Dry Gin 2 bottles Spanish Rioja red 1 hand full juniper berries 1 hand full cloves 4 large cinnamon sticks 3 lemons & 3 oranges, sliced 450ml water 200g caster sugar
Method: In a large cauldron, dissolve the sugar in the water, add the cloves and cinnamon and bring to a boil for 60 seconds. Take off the boil and add the juniper, fruit and wine, it’s very important that you do not let the liquid come to the boil again! Keep on a low heat for 30 minutes before straining it through a sieve. Add the Chilgrove Dry Gin, stir well and serve hot. Garnish glasses with a half-slice of orange in the glass. 24
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A Sovereign seeks out the Shooting Season The White Horse Pub & Inn in Chilgrove prides itself on a rather fortunate seasonal quirk: the UK’s Best Pub and AA Rosette establishment’s busiest period occurs when elsewhere activity dies down - during the Sussex shooting season. With the Glorious Twelfth, the start of the season for red grouse and the busiest shooting day of the year, the White Horse begins to welcome guests to its awardwinning country inn specifically customised for hunters. Fans of the hunt can wake refreshed for the morning shoot with their favourite dog by their bedside, their guns locked safely away in bespoke cabinets, and an early breakfast to energise the shoot. Upon their return, the White Horse even employs a shoot butler to help unpack guests’ cars of their hunting materials. Game shooting has been a popular affair in the UK ever since guns were of a high enough quality to accurately mark prey over three hundred years ago. The British Association for Shooting and Conversation estimates that over 1 million Britons A princely predator take part in shooting activities, activities of which the Royal Family has also traditionally been a spirited participant. Despite mixed public opinions and controversy surrounding the sport, pictures of Princes Charles, William and Harry hunting game in the UK and abroad abound. Commenting on the Royals continued obsession with the sport, The Guardian commented, “The royal 25
shooting obsession was something Princess Diana found repugnant. Requiring little or no skill, royal pheasant shoots are a pre-planned carnage of wildlife, bred specifically for slaughter.” Perhaps the most notorious Royal shooter was George V, whom his biographer, Kenneth Rose, described in his award-winning book as a “keen and expert marksman” and has having a passion for hunting. Before his trip to India only six months after his June 1911 coronation, the Maharaja of Nepal invited George to hunt game, a trip that the King had been dying to make since 1905 when a previously planned excursion was canceled due to cholera outbreak. Only hours after crossing the border into Nepal, George shot his first tiger as it jumped a stream. All told, during ten days of hunting, the Emperor of India’s crew killed a total of 39 tigers, 18 rhinoceros and 4 bears. If that sounds like an enormous amount of game, King George topped it two years later back in the UK. While out hunting in Buckinghamshire in December 1913, his shooting party “bagged” 3,937 pheasants in six hours with over one thousand of the birds killed by the King, a shoot that The Field magazine places as the 34th Top Shot in UK history. Still, there were some pangs of regret for the party’s targets. Even the sporting King admitted, “We went a little too far.” It would appear that the sight of his gun and his royal hindsight were both 20/20. GINNED! Magazine vol. 8
George of the jungle Bagging big game in Nepal
The Chilgrove Bluebird* • • • • • • 26
4 measures Chilgrove Dry Gin 60ml fresh lemon juice 40ml sugar syrup 50ml Lillet blanc 175g fresh blueberries 4 fresh strawberries
Method: Serves 2 - Crush the fruit and pass through a sieve. Combine the resulting juice with the other ingredients. Shake well with ice. Serve in a long-stemmed coupe glass. Garnish with a strawberry on the rim and blueberries in the glass. *bluebird not hunted by King George V GINNED! Magazine vol. 8
Dis(e)rupting the Season of Bacchus Christopher and Celia Beaumont-Hutchings, the husband and wife team behind Chilgrove Dry Gin, have produced the UK’s only gin made from a grape spirit, an unique ingredient that five hundred years ago was not so unique. Recipes found in Holland dating from the period believed to list gin’s original ingredients include a spirit base made of distilled wine, a base that changed to grain due to climatological reasons. In a period known as the Little Ice Age (LIA), the seasons in Northern Europe became too cold to grow grapes. The cause of LIA is the subject of much debate amongst climatologists. Some studies cite evolving orbital cycles of the Earth around the sun while others postulate that decreases in human populations at certain periods led to the cooling. Another plausible theory which for some seems to account for at least part of the cause of LIA focuses on volcanic eruptions. When they get angry, volcanoes spew sulphuric ash into the atmosphere, ash whose particles remain in the sky for years to come blocking some sunlight from reaching the surface and cooling the planet. Some of the coldest periods over the past 1,000 years coincide with periods of heightened volcanic activity. For instance, by far the largest volcanic eruption of the past millennia in terms of sulphuric emissions took place at Indonesia’s Mount Rinjani around 1257, a year that coincides with what some scientists believe to be the start of the 27
LIA and which occurred in a century when at least three other major explosions are documented. The most recent gigantic explosion occurred in 1815 at Indonesia’s Tambora. This explosion, which sent more than 100 million tons of sulphur into the atmosphere, preceded what has since come to be known as the “Year without a Summer” of 1816, a year recognised for devastating food shortages in the Eastern United States and Europe and recorded snowfall in July in New England and even in tropical Taiwan. The Year without a Summer also holds the title of the latest grape harvest on record in Bordeaux with some vineyards starting their vine picking as late as October 28th. In fact, a 2011 study showed that all of the late grape harvests in Europe dating back to 1354 occurred during LIA, particularly at the end of the 17th century and beginning of the 19th century, two periods characterised by several significant volcanic explosions. Do volcanic eruptions continue to affect fragile grape vines? We don’t have any straight scientific proof. But if renowned wine critic Robert Parker’s palate has any say in the matter, his harsh judgement of the 2011, 2012, and 2013 Bordeaux vintages could put paid to the argument: the vintages occurred after Europe’s largest volcanic eruption in recent history, that of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull in 2010. GINNED! Magazine vol. 8
Can volcanoes vanish the vine? Eyjafjallajökull erupts the ire of oenophiles
Grape Minds (think alike) • • • • 28
25ml Chilgrove Dry Gin 5 large grapes 2 dashes crème de cassis English sparkling wine
Method: Smash four grapes in the bottom of a cocktail shaker. Add the gin, crème de cassis and plenty of ice. Shake well. Fill a flute glass 3/4 full of English sparkling wine. Strain the liquid into the cocktail shaker into the flute. Garnish with the remaining grape. GINNED! Magazine vol. 7
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Was Gin made from Wine? A history of gin heard through the grapevine
Winston Churchill was a man that had a firm grasp on history. He felt that one that had not learned from it was doomed to repeat it whilst also believing that history would be good to him because he intended to write it. But Churchill, known to indulge in a dry martini or three, may have been stumped when it came to the history of the gin in those martinis. No matter how much he researched that history in order to learn from it or wrote the history of his own enjoyment of drinking London Dry, the British Bulldog would find he lacked a firm grasp on gin: for the history of gin is open to interpretation. 30
One interpretation on the origins of gin agreed on by several drinks experts places grapes where grain lies today - as the base distillate of gin. When Christopher Beaumont-Hutchings and his wife Celia set out to create their version of the world’s favourite juniper spirit, Chilgrove Dry Gin, they sought to create a modern drink steeped in history, a history whose grape-based interpretation they found most convincing. But how much water (or wine) does this theory hold? GINNED! Magazine vol. 7
David T. Smith, an expert on gin and its history, insists that the origin of gin is a contentious issue and that “everything that is written about it must be done with a certain openness as, unfortunately, the definitive information is not there.” One thing is for certain, however: gin’s origins lie not in the UK but on the Continent, specifically in the region which is today the Netherlands and Belgium. Virtually all drinks historians agree that gin evolved from jenever, a juniper-led drink that dates back to anywhere from the 13th Century to the early 17th Centur y depending on your interpretation of historical texts. The Der naturen bloeme: gin’s original rhyming recipe Jenever Museum in Hasselt, Belgium and its Honorary Chairman, Eric Van Schoonenberghe, trace their research back to one of those texts, Der naturen bloeme, compiled between 1266 and 1269 by Dutch poet Jacob van Maerlant. The museum and Chairman believe Der naturen bloeme to contain the first 31
record of a juniper-infused drink which could be considered an “immediate predecessor of the present-day gin” in so much as van Maerlant rhymes of the properties of the juniper bush as well as descriptions of the plant’s medicinal qualities, descriptions echoed by the p o e t ’s contemporaries. Va n M a e r l a n t ’s description that stands out most for our Gin of the Month’s treatise that gin originated with grapes is that of a “good remedy for abdominal cramps” concocted from juniper berries boiled in wine. Although this isn’t exactly the grape-based spirit reference needed to confirm Chilgrove’s theory, in Der naturen bloeme van Maerlant also speaks of the dry distillation of juniper wood in order to make the juniper oil that Low Lands inhabitants used as medicine during the period. So here we have in the same text evidence of juniper in grape-based alcohol and the plant’s distillation. GINNED! Magazine vol. 8
THE DECLINE OF THE VINE Other historians, however, put the origins of jenever, and by association gin, towards the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th Centuries. Doctor Sylvius de Bouve who lived in the 1500s adopted earlier uses of juniper berries to create what he believed a potent medicine as juniper was still widely used as a sort of cure all. But by this point, however, wine was out of favour in Holland for reasons cultural, economical and environmental. According to American Professor of Medieval History Richard W. Unger, “over the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, wine consumption declined in the Low Countries.” In Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance Unger cites the economical reason of a 50% rise in the price of wines from Hypothermia in Holland: a 1565 Bordeaux caused by the onset of the landscape of the Little Ice Age 100 Year’s War in the mid-1300s, a war which destroyed much of the region’s vineyards. He also notes that by the 1320s records of the houses of Dutch nobles show the wideconsumption of beer versus in the previous century when nobles preferred wine, a cultural shift brought on by a growing popularity of hopped beer from Germany, its subsequent ban by a Dutch count, and the count’s encouragement of locally produced hopped beer. 32
From an environmental standpoint, it appears that early jenever producers like de Bouve would have been hard-pressed to make jenever from a wine-based distillate due to changing weather conditions. Vineyards in Holland and Belgium were not uncommon before de Bouve’s days. But with the onset of what is known as “The Little Ice Age”, a period of colder climates beginning in the 1300s and lasting until the middle of the 19th Century, grapes were more difficult to grow well in the Low Countries and thusly, they would have been harder to find and more expensive. In his 1996 history of jenever, Jenever in de Lage Landen (“Jenever in the Low Countries”), Von Schoonenberghe writes of particularly bad grape harvests in the early 1500s and the subsequent “disappearance of the vineyards in our regions” as the cold wave increased in intensity throughout the rest of the century. With wine hard to come by, de Bouve distilled his disputed “first jenever” with korenbrandewijn, or “burnt barley wine” with “burnt” from “brande” being the actual translation of “distilled”. Brandewijn is the term from which we take “brandy”, which we in the UK know as a grape-based spirt. Cognac, for instance, is simply brandy made in the French region of Cognac. GINNED! Magazine vol. 8
But in Dutch, brandewijn can refer to spirits made from any number of elements. Due to the deterioration of the Low Countries’ vineyards, at the time of de Bouve’s experimentation with spirits, brandewijn was distilled primarily from beer which was no surprise considering the bubbly drink’s popularity. The liquid that de Bouve used to make his version of jenever would resemble what we know as “mash”, the potent beer fermented from malted grains - primarily barley but wheat, rye and corn can also be malted - that is used to make whisky. What’s even more confusing from a terminology perspective in the search for gin’s grape-based spirit origins is that mash is also known as “malt wine.” Malt wine and its distillate are not particularly palatable. That’s why we tend to age it in barrels to produce whisky. That’s also why de Bouve set a trend of distilling it with juniper as well as other herbs and spices - to soften the taste of the harsh spirit. With the addition of these botanicals, people soon found jenever just as pleasant as a recreational drink as they did a medicine. THE ASHES OF FROG BONES Having spanned five centuries and a few theories, at this point you’re probably asking 33
yourself, dear reader, “So what’s the verdict? Was gin made from grapes or not?” Well, as David T. Smith points out, not definitively. But we can come even closer to whatever truth history may hold with one additional - and relatively obscure - text: a humble recipe found at the British Museum. The 18th Century British physician Sir Hans Sloane was a man of curiosities, so much so that he amassed one of the period’s greatest collections. The man for which London’s Sloane Square is named bequeathed a trove of treasures to England via King George II upon his death in 1753, a trove that was displayed to the public for the first time six years later and which composed a large part of the British Museum’s first collection. Amongst these treasures, which included 71,000 objects, was a handauthored Dutch book dating from 1495, now housed at the British Library (image next page). Within its pages, Von Schoonenberghe found two brandy recipes which at first glance may not seem all that impressive. What makes these recipes stand out is their placement within the book - they are not found in the section about “medicinal waters” but rather mixed in amongst “kitchen recipes”. GINNED! Magazine vol. 8
The text for the first recipe, entitled Gebrande wyn te maken (Making Brandy Wine), is accompanied by the phrase de aqua vina. The recipe itself calls for a distillate made from a mixture of wine and beer but simultaneously notes that medicinal brandy may only be distilled from wine, the effectiveness of which increases by distilling with it “wrapped in a little piece of cloth” such plants as sage, nutmeg, clove and, of course, juniper. The presence of juniper in the recipe, however, requires interpretation. Firstly, juniper does not appear to weigh more on the recipe than the other botanicals mentioned. Secondly, it is not 100% certain that the recipe calls for juniper, although highly likely. The 15th Century Dutch term written in the book is gorsbeyn of dameren which literally translates to “the ashes of frog bones”. But historians feel that frogs bones (gorsbeyn) is misleading and is a corruption of three words found in other Dutch texts of the period that mean “juniper”. Thus, the common assumption is that gorsbeyn of dameren means “juniper powder” and that the recipe calling for a wine distillate is in fact the first recorded gin recipe. At the same time, the recipe calling for a pure wine distillate identifies itself as for medicinal purposes, not recreational. The Gebrande wyn te maken recipe with a distillate made from a mixture of wine and beer, however, falling under “kitchen recipes”, would indeed be for recreation. It would then appear that, if this find is indeed the first recorded gin recipe, that it combines gin’s possible grape-based past with its grain-based future. And no one loves to taste past and future more than drinks historians.
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Drinks deity David Wondrich delves into the original directions for Dutch gin GINNED! Magazine vol. 8
GIN RENAISSANCE REVISITED One of the world’s premier followers of historical hooch is Philip Duff. Upon reading about the recipe in the Sloane M a n u s c r i p t s, D u f f b e c a m e mesmerised and traced the origins of the 1495 recipe book back to Eastern Holland, telling the magazine Drinks International that the recipe, “based on grape distillate, is part of the very foundation of the category.�
maken and an alternative version using more modern botanicals. One hundred bottles of Gin 1495, as the resulting spirit is called, resulted from the experts’ efforts. Fittingly, 1495 is the year that the Renaissance arrived in France and continued its spread to the Low Countries where the closest thing we have to the birth of gin was written. Today, five-hundred and twenty years later, gin lovers find themselves in the thick of a gin renaissance, a renaissance led by the likes of Christopher and Celia and their Chilgrove Dry Gin of the Vine.
Taking his obsession a step further, he commissioned a group of drinks experts to follow the trail from the British Library to the Jenever With all their research into the Museum in Zuidam, Holland near history of the spirit, the pair has the original location of the 1495 certainly learned from the mistakes Gin 1495: summoning snuffed out spirits book’s publications, and then on to of others and will not repeat them Cognac where the world’s most as Churchill warned. And Churchill well-known grape-based spirits are would certainly have given the made. Here, the trip’s funding partner, EuroWineGate (EWG), a couple a friendly wink as he sipped a Chilgrove Dry Martini for like specialist in grape-based spirits, worked with the experts to distill two himself, he would appreciate that they are writing their own modern recipes, one that was a near exact representation of Gebrande wyn te history of gin. đ&#x;?¸ 35
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Original Gin
In this edition of GINNED! Magazine, we focus primarily on the role of the grape in the origins of gin, a little-known historical fun fact revived in reality in the UK by Chilgrove Dry Gin. But the element that remains most important to the origins, history and the current renaissance of our favourite spirit is the juniper berry. Without the perceived medicinal properties of juniper since the Middle Ages, the distillation of the conifer cone may never have come to pass and we would not today enjoy the piney-notes that define the base flavours of proper gin. Here we explore the original juniper-based recipes forever historically connected to what is now the idiosyncratic British spirit. 36
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Der Naturen bloeme 1269 The Dutch poet Jacob van Maerlant (pictured at left in his Der Naturen Bloeme), wrote a rhyming compilation of encyclopediae of the period, composing verse describing the nature of man, animals and plants. In his study of van Maerlant’s text, drinks scholar and Honorary Chairman of Belgium’s Jenever Museum describes specific and somewhat casual references to juniper which indicate that the berry-like cone would have been well-known amongst potential readers of the text. Chapter thirteen of the text details the characteristics of the juniper bush precisely whereas descriptions of other plants are compared to the bush. Van Maerlant’s rhymes also layout for the reader the medicinal properties of juniper and how to use the plant to concoct remedies for common ailments. Some scholars feel that these recipes are the original gin recipes. The English translation of van Maerlant’s text reads as follows: “He who wants to be rid of stomach pain Should use juniper cooked in rainwater. He who has cramps Cook juniper in wine, It’s good against the pain.”
Jacob the jongleur jams on juniper 37
This all sounds fine and good, but we think we’ll stick to a more modern medicinal recipe for the juniper-infused drink, one originally intended to stave off malaria: the Gin & Tonic. GINNED! Magazine vol. 8
Making brandywine in 1495
A Dutch text dating to 1495 (pictured) found amongst the manuscripts of Sir Hans Sloane, one of the British Museum’s original texts, lists two recipes for what became in Holland as brandewijn (burned wine); Gebrande wyn te maken (Making brandy wine) and Een ander manyr om brande wyn tmaken (another way to make brandy wine). In the first recipe, brandy comes to be from a distillate made from a mixture of wine and beer and a note in the margin reads “de aqua vina” referring to the “wine water”. In the margin of the second recipe, the author wrote “de aqua vitae” which is a distillate - the water of life - used at the time for medicinal purposes. Described in further detail, the recipes are distinguished from the author’s note that for the brande wyn to serve medicinal purposes it 38
must be distilled from wine. To increase it’s medicinal properties, it is suggested that several herbs be infused in the distillate, specifically sage leaves, nutmeg, clove, cinnamon, galanga (similar to ginger), grains of paradise, and gorse bush. It is with this last term that we have our juniper. Scholars have linked it with several other terms of the time that translate to juniper and believe the author simply used his own spelling. Combined with the distillate and other listed botanicals that we still use in gin recipes today, the two brande wyn recipes are the ancestors of today’s plethora of gin variations. image credit: Gin 1495 GINNED! Magazine vol. 8
Jenever
The direct descendant of the previous two recipes is jenever, a juniper spirit whose traditional recipes remain highly popular in the Netherlands, Belgium and the parts of France and Germany near the Low Countries. It is well known that jenever is the predecessor of gin when it first arrived in the UK with English soldiers returning to England from Holland during the Glorious Revolution. Today, jenever is protected with eleven distinct Appellation d’origine contrôlée categories ranging from broad protection across the aforementioned countries to those more specific to jeneverproducing towns such as Hasselt in Belgium and regions such as Flandres-Artois in France. 39
The three most popular styles of jenever are jonge jenever (young), oude jenever (old) and korenwijn (grain wine). Despite the two first styles appearing to be discernible by age, it is in fact the distillation process that separates them, distillation processes that have evolved with time from being made primarily with malt wine to being made with a grain distillate. Korenwijn, which sticks closer to original recipes in that it uses more malt wine, is often aged but aging is not required. If aged, however, it must stay a minimum of 1 year in a barrel of less than 700 litres. image: Wynand Fockink, the tasting room of the oldest distillery in Amsterdam, dating to 1679 GINNED! Magazine vol. 8
Jenever Jonge jenever 35% - minimum ABV 15% - maximum of malt wine in the distillate 10g - maximum amount of sugar per litre Oude jenever 35% - minimum ABV 15% - minimum of malt wine in the distillate 20g - maximum amount of sugar per litre Korenwijn 38% - minimum ABV 51% - minimum of malt wine in distillate 20g - maximum amount of sugar per litre đ&#x;?¸ 40
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The Great Grape Rape How one counterfeiter changed the rare wine market forever
As you unbox your bottle of Chilgrove Dry Gin this month, dear Craft Gin Club Members, you may wish to think twice about actually drinking it. As the only English gin made with a grape-base spirit, Chilgrove has the potential of evolving into a sought-after collectors item, a rare vintage as it were, worth thousands of pounds. Well, maybe that’s just our third G&T talking. The chances of a serious market for rare gins emerging are pretty slim. But hey, we’re a gin club. We have a right to our juniper-induced delusions! On the other hand, the market for rare versions of another grape-based alcoholic drink, wine, continues to improve with age. In 2014, reports of record sales were not uncommon and total sales at auction reached $352 million (£225 million) as supposedly savvy collectors - two-thirds of whom will wait as the wine appreciates in price, never tasting a drop - snatched up individual lots at prices in the millions. 41
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UNCORKING THE COUNTERFEITERS With so much money on the table, it is no surprise that the market In the early 2000s, one man nearly perfected both techniques. has attracted its fair share of con artists. Although the exact Southern California resident Rudy Kurniawan, just twenty-four years percentage of fake wines in circulation isn’t of age at the turn of the century, became the known, at least one expert in the area has Which bottle holds a bunch of fine grapes? world’s most revered rare wine collector, claimed that there is a “ton” of fraudulent Which holds a bunch of crap? bidding tens of millions on the most coveted wine on the market, counterfeits which have in vintages, sharing generously with his oenophile the not-too-distant past been perpetrated by friends, and hitting record sales figures when some of the industry’s most respected players. putting his collections on the auction block. But not long after, his revered wine status Counterfeiting wine isn’t rocket science. But turned to reviled vinegar. Kurniawan turned it’s not a walk in the park either. In one out to be no more than a fraudster who popular swindling strategy, fraudsters replace through his dishonesty and the volume of bottles’ labels, a trick that proves easier with fakes he put in circulation has changed the older vintages as uniform branding had yet to market for fine wines perhaps forever. emerge. But apart from designing the label to a point beyond suspicion, a scammer also has to ON THE NOSE: NASCENT NOTES OF worry about the glass of the bottle, the wax or NOTORIETY foil covering the cork, even the glue which Kurniawan, who arrived in the US on a holds the label on the bottle. student visa from Indonesia in 1996 and stayed illegally long after it expired, began tasting Another con artist technique for bottles still wines around the turn of the century and valuable but whose buyers actually plan to quickly fell in love with everything about the drink the wine is to mimic the taste of a rare vintage by blending luxurious liquid, particularly the high flyers tasting and buying rare cheaper wines of similar ages procured from the same regions to bottles. Soon after his first taste, he began joining wine clubs in obtain similar notes and mouth feel to what would be expected upon California, clubs to which some of the US’s most well-to-do opening the rare bottle. oenophile’s belonged. 42
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While building up his rolodex, the young student also built up his knowledge of wine, especially from a sensory perspective. American exporter of French wines and friend to Rudy, Paul Wasserman, told Vanity Fair that his protogé had “a photographic aromatic memory.” Kurniawan used this taste talent, his growing knowledge of old French wines, and his deep pockets to impress his wealthy friends, impressions that led him to become almost overnight the US’s most avid and sought-after collector.
buying up the cellars of private individuals. At one point, it is estimated that Kurniawan was spending $1 million (£644,500) on wine every week. His seemingly profligate purchases caught the attention of the hubristic rich crowd who started to catch up and compete, competition that acted to quickly push up the value of rare wines and the amount bid on them at auction. A 2006 profile of Kurniawan in the Los Angeles Times cites statistics showing that the bottle price at auction jumped 62% from the Q1 of 2001 to the Q3 of 2006, a rise that has since self-perpetuated.
Drinking rare wines and making friends with the top 0.01% of the nation’s income bracket does Around the time of the LA not come cheap and Kurniawan Times article, with wine prices needed to splash out to maintain bursting barrels and after having his profile. To keep up with the amassed an enormous big guns, the Talented Mr. Rudy collection, Kurniawan began to drove a Ferrari and a Bentley, sell. The intake of only two had a house in the posh Los Kurniawan: sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong 2006 auctions of his collection Angeles suburb of Arcadia, and grossed over $35 million (£22.6 wore custom-made Hermès suits all thanks to what appears to be a million). At these auctions, Vanity Fair reports that amongst wealthy ethnic Chinese father in his native Indonesia: he never Kurniawan’s lots were bottles from several chateaux very rarely divulged details about his family or origins. appearing on the block and in unheard of quantities. Without a doubt, the thirty-year old illegal alien had turned the world’s Around 2003, the playboy from Jakarta began appearing regularly at wealthiest wine collectors green with envy, a color that not long after wine auctions, spending millions on lots of rare wine and on the side turned Burgundy red with anger. 43
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ON THE PALATE: A SOUPÇON OF SUSPICION Suspicions of the authenticity of the auction lots sourced from Kurniawan’s cellar grew in the spring of 2008 when Laurent Ponsot, head of Domaine Ponsot, a Burgundy wine estate with 12 grand cru wines in its portfolio, got word of an auction in New York at which several cases of grand cru wine from Domaine Ponsot Clos SaintDenis were to be sold. The auction list dated the cases’ vintage between 1945 and 1971. Ponsot became immediately suspicious for one very obvious reason: his family had only bought the Clos SaintDenis territory in 1982. Lunching with Kurniawan the day after the auction, Ponsot asked the collector where he had obtained the cases, a question that Kurniawan skirted by claiming that he had bought so much wine in previous years that he was uncertain of the origin of the previous day’s sale. With the promise of a contact dug up from his records upon a return to California, Kurniawan left Ponsot wondering whether the collector himself had been duped or if he was doing the duping. Determining whether a collector selling his bottles at auction is “a victim or a predator,” Ponsot’s words for Kurniawan soon after his first lunch, turns out to be a rather difficult task. Previous sales of the Indonesian’s collection from 2006 had resulted in some experts realising that at least a certain percentage of bottles were fraudulent while others - which later proved fake - passed the same experts without suspicion, even when those experts were executives of the chateaux on the label. How can you prove if a collector is actually a counterfeiter without any concrete evidence? 44
Fine wine consultant Maureen Downey claims that “no one can taste for authenticity.” At an October 2014 panel on wine fraud covered by the Vox Media food site, Eater, Downey described the steps that she takes to determine authenticity which focus on the wine’s packaging: the bottle, the label, the glue holding the label to the bottle; the paper the label is printed on; the wax covering the cork, etc. Downey is currently working on a website, www.winefraud.com, which upon its launch at the end of June 2015 will help fine wine collectors determine the genuineness of their purchases. At the same panel, William Koch of America’s notoriously wealthy Koch family, echoed Downey’s sentiment’s saying, “Focusing on the wine that’s in the bottle is wrong, unless you have super taste; you have to focus on the bottle.” The provenance of Koch’s expertise on the matter? Buying counterfeit wines from counterfeiters including Kurniawan. In the autumn of 2009, Koch sued Kurniawan claiming that bottles he had purchased from the young oenophile’s collection were fakes, a lawsuit followed several months later by an FBI investigation culminating in March 2012 with a raid on Kurniawan’s Arcadia house. The FBI discovered a sophisticated counterfeiting operation upon storming the immigrant’s home: thousands of fake labels, rubber stamps for marking corks with the names of famous chateaux on them, hand-written recipes for mixing wines to mimic sought-after rare vintages, and a number of bottles in the process of being transformed into fakes.
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The collector had used such strategies as having restaurants ship him consumed bottles of the most in-demand vintages that he would then reuse, purchasing inexpensive old wines from Burgundy merchants and bottling them with fake labels from the most respected wine makers, and blending some expensive wines with less expensive ones to artificially inflate the number of rare wines in his collection. All told, Downey estimates the value of wines that Kurniawan successfully sold in his criminal career at around $100 million (ÂŁ65.5 million). THE FINISH: LONG, BITTER AND EXTREMELY EXPENSIVE
The number of fake bottles still in circulation at these auctions is unknown. But the buyers - certainly not your average day labourer seem to have rid themselves of any caveat emptor logic. For many wine “investorsâ€?, particularly in Asia in recent years, a fine wine collection and the rarest of bottles act as status symbols. For example, the most expensive bottle ever purchased remains a 1787 Chateau Lafitte purchased by Christopher Forbes of the billionaire American family in 1985 for $156,450, or the equivalent of $344,014 (ÂŁ225,250) in 2015. After its London purchase, the bottle flew back to New York in its own seat on the family private jet. The bottle’s cork eventually fell into the twocentury-old liquid meaning that as a tasting item, the wine wouldn’t stand up to the cheapest on the market.
With the rogue of rare rouge behind bars as of the summer of 2014, has the market for fine wine regained its sanity? Not particularly. Despite If all the money sloshing around in scores of scandals and regular red aged bottles of fermented grape Counterfeit corks and lying labels found at Kurniawan’s home flags raised before supposedly fine juice makes you think wealthy wines go on sale, auction houses oenophiles have vinegar on the brain, continue to reap record returns. Sales rose 4.5% in 2014 reaching rest assured: not everyone in the fine wine business agrees that it’s a $352 million (ÂŁ230 million). The jewel of the auction houses that money-making investors game. The most well-known wine critic in year? Wines from Burgundy, the same wines in which Kurniawan the world, Robert Parker, whose reviews are the bible for investors specialised and whose “elevated pricesâ€? wine auction house Wally’s and which can make or break a vintage, doesn’t feel that with all of CEO referred to as “the story of 2014.â€? the money it costs to store and protect fine wine that it’s a good investment. Unless, that is, the investor plans to drink it. đ&#x;?¸ 45
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A Global Warming up to English Wine
Global warming is not a phenomenon that most would associate with anything positive. The term conjures up visions of inundated cities, harsh hurricanes, and dying crops unable to support life as we know it. But for the English wine industry, those visions are different. They see sunny days and longer summers in a land notorious for its sporadic rain and gloomy grey skies. With those prospects, one could say that English viticulturists are actually warming up to global warming, the positive effects of which are becoming increasingly apparent for their wines, wines that those beyond their borders have begun to recognise. 46
Bolney Wine Estate, West Sussex GINNED! Magazine vol. 8
International competitions have been pressing medals for English wines almost as quickly as the industry is pressing grapes. At the 2014 International Wine and Spirits Competition (IWSC), the industry stole 80 medals, a record for English wines which have been steadily growing their competitiveness over the years. Winning wineries include the Camel Valley Winery, which has been awarded a gold medal for its 2008 Pinot Noir Rosé Brut, Wiston Estates which has won four gold medals for its Rosé and the Gusbourne Estate which has taken home two gold outstanding medals, the IWSC’s highest honour.
The push towards provenance in UK food and drink is also pushing the UK public towards their nations wines. Waitrose announced that sales of English wines in 2014 were up 95% on the previous year, upping that figure as of April 2015 when it announced those sales had increased 177% year-on-year. BUBBLING UP OR FIZZING OUT?
But despite its recent success, the English wine industry has a very long way to go in terms of catching up with more traditional wine-producing Restaurateurs in the UK are taking countries. For instance, despite all the notice of the success of English buzz around the industry and the wines which have been making a public’s shift to locally made products, splash on the menus of some of the English wines accounted for a mere country’s most famous restaurants 0.14% of the UK wine market in including those owned by the likes of 2014 according to the industry body, Gordon Ramsay, Heston Blumenthal, Roasting the competition with a flight of English wine at E n g l i s h W i n e P r o d u c e r s. I n and Jamie Oliver. The White Horse, Burough Market’s Roast production terms, whereas UK the UK’s Best Pub and the idea oven vineyards shipped a record 6.3 million of the Craft Gin Club’s grape-based Gin of the Month, Chilgrove bottles in 2014, in 2013 Italy produced approximately 6.8 billion Dry Gin, carries a hand-picked selection of English wines from bottles, a production multiple of over 1,000. In monetary terms, vineyards in Sussex. Roast, a restaurant in London’s Burough Market, DEFRA and English Wine Producers estimate that English wine will featured a prix-fixe menu that paired an English wine with every generate nearly £100 million in revenues in 2015. But in 2014, UK course during this year’s English Wine Week, celebrated the last week sales just of Champagne - never mind the other myriad wine imports of May. to the UK - reached £340 million. 47
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The comparison with Champagne, however, goes well beyond sales. To begin, some of the UK’s principle grape-growing regions such as the South Downs have chalky terrain similar to those that give wine from Champagne its signature style. Secondly, despite the fact that due to climate the UK must grow different species of grapes than some of the world’s more famous wine regions such as Bordeaux and Tuscany, the two most planted vines in the UK are Chardonnay and Pinot Noir (21.1% and 19.3% of total UK vines respectively), two of the three grape varieties used to make the famous French bubbly. What’s more, two-thirds of all English wines made are of the effervescent kind.
produce great fizz like in Champagne, as the temperature edges up in the UK, Goode feels that the island will reach a point where the “most interestingâ€? wines are produced: “close to the limits of where grapes can successfully ripen.â€? Goode mentions famous wine regions such as Burgundy and Germany’s Mosel Saar Ruwer as examples of regions that produce grapes that don’t grow well in warmer climates such as Languedoc but whose vine species produce very fine wines in cooler regions. Putting aside the negative environmental impacts that global warming could inflict on the world, all of this news of warmer climates in the UK sounds like a dream come true for English wine producers, producers who will no doubt continue to win awards on an international level. Their success may, in fact, convince another English alcoholic beverage from Sussex winning international medals to rethink its recipe. Chilgrove Dry Gin, the UK’s only gin made with a grape distillate, currently sources its base spirit from the warm wine regions of Spain. Perhaps the gin, which refers to itself as “Gloriously Englishâ€?, could switch out its Spanish spirit for an English eau de vie made from grapes grown in the chalky soils of the same South Downs from whence it hails. đ&#x;?¸
Today, with changing climates, some think that the weather has warmed enough in the UK’s wine countries to mimic the weather of Champagne. The owner of Dorset’s Furleigh Estate, Rebecca Hansford, told The Guardian that “Global warming has helped. Increasing temperatures mean our climate now has roughly the same number of warm days as they had in the Champagne region in the 1970s.� These warm days are crucial for British viticulturists according to wine journalist and author Jamie Goode on his online publication, wineanorak.com, and with continued global warming could be a boon for English wines beyond sparkling. Whereas now the UK’s vines 48
Gusbourne’s Double-Gold GINNED! Magazine vol. 8
Harvesting history’s most unique aqua vitae de juniperus
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