Tarquin’s Cornish Gin

Tarquin's Cornish Dry Gin is the bottle that put Cornwall on the gin map. Tarquin Leadbetter, a Le Cordon Bleu-trained chef stuck in a London office at 23, moved back to the West Country in 2012 to open Southwestern Distillery — the first new distillery in Cornwall in over a hundred years — and spent a year testing a hundred recipes on a tiny 0.7-liter copper pot before settling on twelve botanicals and firing up a second-hand Portuguese alembic still named Tamara. The first batch went to the Gurnard Head Hotel in St Ives. Five years later it was named World's Best Gin at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition, and it's since taken Gold at the IWSC and stacked medals from every major competition. The recipe uses traditional botanicals in slightly untraditional ways: fresh orange, lemon, and grapefruit rather than dried peel, a light hand with coriander, cinnamon instead of cassia for a sweeter aromatic spice, and Devon violets picked from Tarquin's own garden — a nod to the early-20th-century Devon Violets perfume — adding a green freshness behind the juniper. Everything is distilled in small batches over a naked flame, hearts cut only, bottled at 42% ABV with a hand-sealed wax cap. The Gin Is In found a crisp, juniper-forward nose that suggests a boreal forest, a palate heady with bright lemon zest, neroli, and cardamom, and called it supremely balanced with a beautiful mouthfeel. A benchmark contemporary gin — Martini, G&T, or Aviation.

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