Mountain flavors add unique twist to gin craze

Piling in for after-work drinks, around two dozen people pore over the menu at Mother's Ruin, a speciality gin bar in Cape Town, where homegrown varieties are making a mark on the global scene.

The menu is a daunting tome of 144 gins from around the globe, more than 20 of them South African and steeped in the flavors of the country's unique coastal mountains.

"Those are very popular - all the foreigners that come in here want to see what gins South Africa has to offer," says part owner Will Pretorius, whose current favourite is A Mari, a variety from Cape Town distilled with seawater.

"Gin around the world is starting to have a moment and South Africa has jumped on the bandwagon," says gin maker Lucy Beard.

In 2015, her gin distillery Hope On Hopkins was the first to be licensed in Cape Town, just as the drink began to make a stir.

"Very soon after, small gin distilleries began popping up in Cape Town and its surrounds, with quite a few on the wine farms, too," she adds.

Formerly lawyers based in London, Beard and her partner Leigh Lisk, who are both South African, turned their hand to gin after taking a year off to travel around Europe.

Beard said: "It was basically a passing comment: 'Do you think we could make gin?' We downloaded a book on distilling to our Kindles and sat in a campsite in Spain reading it."

It's a simple enough process: spirits are distilled with what gin makers call botanicals to add flavor. The only rule - one of those flavors must be juniper.

What then distinguishes one gin from the next is everything else the distiller chooses to add to the mix.

In South Africa, that has predominantly been the flowers and herbs of the mountains surrounding Cape Town, collectively called "fynbos": sweet kapokbos, strong and fresh buchu, dry rooibos, rose geranium, wild olives, honeybush - a mountainside riot of choice.

"There are so many flavors to experiment with," says Simon Von Witt of Woodstock Gin, a hole-in-the-wall affair on a busy Cape Town road, with a coffee shop upfront and a distillery round the back that produces about 1,000 bottles a month.

The shop is a hive of activity to meet an order due for export to Belgium the next day.

"Fynbos has thousands of varieties, so you're looking at a massive amount you can work with," says Von Witt.

His ingredient of choice is rooibos, a plant famous for the tea brewed from its leaves and the predominant ingredient of Woodstock Gin's bestselling variety, aptly named High Tea.

"The rooibos is quite dry and the honeybush contrasts that - it's slightly sweet and it just brings out amazing flavors," he says. "It's such a uniquely South African plant."

Gin itself, though, has not been a typical drink in South Africa, where beer, wine and brandy dominate.

Some 78 percent of all alcohol consumed here in 2015 was beer, according to the South African Wine Industry Information & Systems body.

Gin accounted for just 0.1 percent, only ahead of South Africa's cane spirit distilled from fermented molasses.

But as gin enjoys its moment, the oversaturated market in South African craft beers offers a warning.

The trick would be to make a gin that appeals "to everyone, right across the board, from millennials to the older generation", Von Witt said.

"We're not there yet," he added.

But Beard is hopeful.

"The fervour around it will die out eventually, but there will always be those people who love to reach for a good, craft gin," she said.

Customers have a drink at the Mother's Ruin bar, which stocks more than 144 varieties of gin, in the center of Cape Town.Rodger Bosch / Agence Francepresse