The French have Bastille Day. The U.S. has Independence Day. Here in the Great White North, we have a celebration to mark freedom from our own kind of oppression: May Two-Four, the official end of winter. It's also the weekend when Canadians come together as one in the gridlock of beer store parking lots.
Much as I love saying it in my best hoser-speak, "Two-Four" for Victoria Day rings oddly this year, don't you think? The beer-case conceit just doesn't fit when the statutory holiday falls a full six days before Queen Victoria's actual birthday, the 24th.
So this is a good year to remind fellow Canadians that the grand lady was not big on hops - no King of Beers for this queen. "Hock," the British nickname for Rhine wine, was her tonic.
If there is a drink that can be called Victorian, however, it's gin, the bevvie that flourished under her watch, all 63 years of it. This and the fact she was Empress of India is why you'll find her image on the label of Bombay Sapphire, the premium brand in the blue bottle.
It's also why a much larger and more youthful portrait of Victoria can be found on a new, craft-distilled Canadian gin made near the queen's namesake city on Vancouver Island and aptly named Victoria Gin. Released locally in minuscule quantities last year, the brand soon expanded across British Columbia and was recently made available in select LCBO stores in Ontario for summer.
As with the British monarchy, its taste isn't cheap. A 750-millilitre bottle sells for $49.95, which in the gin universe is rarefied air.
"I liked gin, but I wanted it to be better," says Bryan Murray, a family doctor and owner of Victoria Spirits Ltd. "What was available in Victoria was just your basic industrial-strength stuff. The first distillation that we did ... was one of those eureka experiences where you realize you're right, that it can taste better."
Essentially a father-son operation, the company operates out of a humble building in the far reaches of a farmyard in Saanich near Victoria. Murray describes the scene as "one step short of Dukes of Hazzard," although it has an incongruous tasting room cobbled together not from rocking chairs and used bourbon barrels but from 1950s modern furniture.
It's modest in appearance, but not in ambition. "The whole intent was to try and produce the best-tasting gin in the world," says Murray, who runs the business with his stepson and distiller, Peter Hunt. "Some people thing we've achieved that goal."
I wouldn't go that far, but this is one very fine gin, impressively balanced and assertively flavoured. I like the spice and licorice notes that counterbalance the classic juniper essence.
The brand's first "blind tasting" review from experts came about a month ago at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition, where it took one of several silver medals. It tied with Hendricks, the trendy superpremium $42 Scottish brand that is prominently and idiosyncratically flavoured with cucumber and rose petals. It also tied two English gins - Martin Miller's London Dry Gin ($39.95) and Whitley Neill London Dry Gin ($29.95) - that are currently in the Ontario market and I like very much.
The "best gin" from that competition? Bluecoat, a luxe brand from Philadelphia that I have not tried and is not, to my knowledge, available in Canada.
The two-year-old Victoria brand is part of a boomlet in pricey gins that has begun to echo the rise of luxury vodkas over the past 20 years.
Though such premium brands as Bombay Sapphire, Tanqueray No. Ten and Hendrick's have been around for years, critics have lately been oohing about small-batch gins sprouting from about a dozen so-called microdistilleries, mainly in the United States. Lending its benediction to the trend, Beefeater, the world's No. 1 brand, last month launched Beefeater 24 in Canada, priced at $39.95. Infused with extra essences of Japanese Sencha tea and grapefruit, it gets its name from the extended, 24-hour botanical-steeping process that supposedly extracts a more complex and balanced flavour profile.
