In Praise of Gin: The Majestic Spirit

20 years ago, if you asked for a gin and tonic in a UK pub, you would get one (or if lucky, maybe two) ice cubes in a thin tall glass, a choice of two gins (Gordons or Beefeaters) one tonic (sch…you know who) and you would often have to remind them to put in a slice of lemon, which would often be accompanied by a sneer.

Oh, how the world has changed since then.

Now you will often have a choice of 12-24 gins, unless they are a specialist bar in which case you could have up 150. You may have a choice of 2-12 tonics, which is good, as the tonic overall can have more of an effect on the taste of your gin and tonic than the gin does. In an old style pub you may still only get a nasty highball glass, but anywhere that knows what they are doing you will often get a lovely large balloon glass, filled to the top with ice – and will be provide, or offered, a range of accompaniments such as lemon, lime, berries, fruit, spices etc.

In the specialist gin bar of the Penha Longa Resort hotel outside Lisbon they have 150 gins, and a selection of eight tonics each married to a specific set of gins, and a box full of dried and fresh fruits and botanicals and spices with unique combinations for any gin and tonic combination. They all come in massive balloon glass, filled with ice and are absolutely delicious.

Penha Longa Gin Bar

How did we get here?

Dutch Jenever had originally been a medicine, a ‘tonic’ if you will. The earliest references to it are in the Netherlands in the 13th Century, but it became much better known over the ages, and by the 17th Century was well established as a popular drink, and could have anise, caraway, coriander or other botanicals as well as the staple juniper. It was introduced into the United Kingdom and was well known by the Restoration, but its adoption exploded after the Glorious Revolution when the Dutch William & Mary made it both fashionable and economic, by taxing the importation of all other spirits.

This kick-started the gin craze, which lasted from 1695–1735, and by the end of the 15,000 drinking establishments in London, not including coffee shops and drinking chocolate shops, over half were gin shops. In 1720, it has been estimated that as many as a quarter of households in London were making their own Gin. This period is well illustrated (literally) by Hogarth at the time, and by the contemporary slogan “drunk for a penny, dead drunk for two-pence”. Being unlicensed, gin at that time could be adulterated with turpentine or other unhealthy additives. Nowadays, of course, gin must conform to strictly defined ingredients and processes.

So, how did tonic come into the picture?

In the 17th Century, the Spanish had discovered that indigenous peoples in Peru used a kind of bark to address various “fevers.” Stripped from the cinchona tree, the bark seemed to work well for malaria. The “Jesuit’s bark,” as it was known, quickly became a favoured treatment for malaria in Europe. Eventually it became clear that cinchona bark could be used not only to treat malaria, but also to prevent it. The bark—and its active ingredient, quinine —was a powerful medicine. But it was also a powerful new weapon in the European quest to conquer and rule distant lands.

Quinine powder quickly became critical to the health of the empire. By the 1840s British citizens and soldiers in India were using 700 tons of cinchona bark annually for their protective doses of quinine. Quinine powder kept the troops alive, allowed officials to survive in low-lying and wet regions of India, and ultimately permitted a stable British population to prosper in Britain’s tropical colonies. Quinine was so bitter, though, that British officials stationed in India and other tropical posts such as Malaya took to mixing the powder with soda and sugar: ‘tonic water’, was born.

Still, tonic water was basically a home brew until an enterprising Brit named Erasmus Bond introduced the first commercial tonic water in 1858—perhaps not coincidentally, the very same year the British government ousted the East India Co. and took over direct control of India.

Bond’s new tonic was soon followed by Schweppes’ introduction, in 1870, of “Indian Quinine Tonic,” a product specifically aimed at the growing market of overseas British who, every day, had to take a preventative dose of quinine. Schweppes and other commercial tonics proliferated both in the colonies and, eventually, back in Britain itself.

Quinine proved as critical to the battle over the Pacific in World War II as it had to the struggle over India. As Amy Stewart notes in her new book, The Drunken Botanist, Japan seized Java, the home of huge cinchona plantations, from the Dutch in 1942, cutting off nearly all of the Allied supply of quinine. The last American plane to fly out of the Philippines before it fell to the Japanese carried some 4 million quinine seeds. Unfortunately, the effort was largely in vain: The trees grew too slowly to provide sufficient quinine to the Allied war effort.

The drink went from a bitter medicinal tipple in tropical outposts to a mainstay of British clubs and bars by World War I. Then, in the ’70s and ’80s, gin began to wane in popularity and was almost forgotten as a broader range of non-gin-based cocktails became popular, as did vodka – for some unaccountable reason.

Now, vodka is fine - as far as it goes – but it doesn’t go very far. Let’s face it, it is raw unflavoured alcohol – unless it happens it have a piece of bison grass in it. As such it is pretty tasteless, and boring – especially compared to gin. But it’s easy to put in the freezer and generate shots for relatively low cost.

Vodka’s essential ‘nothingness’ is well illustrated by the fact that when I bought a ‘gin-making kit’ for Christmas, the first step in the instruction was to “buy a bottle of cheap grain-based vodka” – as it is the tabula rasa of spirits.

Lemon or lime?

This old debate has been rendered largely redundant due to the wide range of fruits now available in gin and tonic. However, if they are the only citrus fruits on offer, I personally favour lime as being the more enjoyable and tastier. In India lemon would have been more available than lime, but in Malaya it was the other way around - some gin manufacturer’s actually recommend lime (Gordons, Bombay Sapphire).

Some Iberian gins do better with orange, but, for me, never cucumber!

The birth of the Iberian ‘gin-tonica’

The final stage in the resurgence of gin and tonic, took place in Spain and Portugal over the last few decades. Gin Tonica, as it’s known in Spain, was started in the Basque region, and has pretty much become Spain’s national drink - hmmm, is that cultural appropriation? Spanish-style G&Ts are always served in a ‘copa de balon’ or balloon glass to allow the drinker to take in the aromas of the gin, tonic and garnish.

Gone are the days of ‘ice and a slice’; a real Spanish G&T will contain a premium gin, a quality tonic, and a variety of herbs, spices, fruits or flowers to complement the botanicals in the gin. I recently had a weekend break in San Sebastián with two of my daughters, and – apart from the wonderful food – the whole experience was greatly enhanced by the wide range of different gin-tonica combinations we enjoyed in each bar.

Essentially, it’s a whole different drink, and all the better for it, after a very long journey from the Netherlands, through Spanish Peru, London, India and Malaya, back to the UK and the USA, and then finally back to the Spanish influence for a majestic rebirth.

Partly as a result of this rebirth, there has also been an explosion in the popularity of gin and the in the range of local, boutique and ‘artisan’ gins, which explains why you can sometimes have a choice of 150 gins or more.

I have occasionally been tempted by alternative aperitifs, such as the Moscow Mule and such, from time to time, but the perfect long sundowner must remain the majestic new-generation gin and tonic.

There’s also so much else you can do with gin – in cocktails, but that subject deserves its own Blog…

[I must note that I have plagiarised bits of Wikipedia (naturally) as well as the excellent Slate article here]