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.
The upscaling of gin also led to something of a resurgence in classic cocktails, which with brandy was a pillar of mixology in the first half of the past century, cocktails' golden era.
"They feature massively in old recipes," says Merlin Griffiths, a former bartender and now global brand ambassador for Bombay Sapphire. "I was looking through the Savoy cocktail book from the thirties and it's almost predominantly gin throughout. There's over 120 recipes in there featuring gin, which is amazing."
If vodka is a barman's idea of water, gin could be considered tea - a flavourless clear spirit embellished with "botanical" infusions. In addition to juniper, which by definition is the primary ingredient, it typically includes coriander, angelica, anise, cardamom and orange. But anything goes.
And any location goes. Though gin has long been associated with the British Empire and Holland, legally, unlike Scotch whisky, it can be made wherever. Including Canada.
Victoria Gin is far from the first made in this country. Another small producer, Island Spirits Distillery on Hornby Island, B.C., makes one. And big brands such as Gilbey's have been around for decades. But Victoria Spirits may be the first small-batch specialty gin maker in the land.
Murray had designs on making gin when he made a minority investment in a winery, Winchester Cellars, in 2006; eventually he persuaded the partners to purchase a still. The gleaming $100,000 German contraption, all coppery and bulbous and about the size of a large fridge, arrived two years ago. Meanwhile, the other partners, including the original distiller, lost interest in the sideline, leaving Murray holding the still. Hunt, his 30-year-old stepson, who has a master's degree in microbiology from the University of Victoria, took over six months ago as distiller.
Murray, 64, often takes turns supervising the still after work, which he describes as way less hectic than his medical practice. "I've already got a job. I wasn't necessarily looking for another," he says. "But it's a good balance. You just basically watch the still. It's wood-fired, so every now and again you throw a log on the fire."
Do his medical patients joke about needing a prescription for his gin? "Just about every day," he says.
Murray plans to add a second still to double his annual production capacity to 300,000 bottles. It's a figure he'll have to meet if, as planned, distribution expands cross-country within a year.
Though he had never made liquor before, Murray said his guiding principle was to craft a spirit that tastes great at room temperature and is sipped like a single malt Scotch - "no rocks, no vermouth, no olives or twist," which is how he likes to enjoy gin.
But he's learning about spirits marketing - particularly to foodies and to a younger market with disposable income - and that means cocktails. His neo-hillbilly gin will be featured this weekend at Vancouver's luxury Shangri-La Hotel, where bartender Derek Vanderheide created Victoria Gin cocktails to pair with a menu by executive chef David Foot.
Murray says he almost went too far in his attempt to appeal to a younger market. One of the names he seriously considered for the brand: Barking Dog, a reference to a nearby vineyard.
"It was less conservative or traditional than Victoria Gin," he says. "I think we made the right choice."
*****
Two gin cocktails: one classic, one cool
Sapphire Collins
INGREDIENTS
1½ oz Bombay Sapphire gin ½ oz fresh lemon juice¾ oz simple syrup (sugar syrup)
3 oz club soda
METHOD
Pour gin, lemon juice and simple syrup into a Collins glass with ice and stir well. Add more ice and top with club soda. Garnish with a lemon wedge.
Source: Bombay Sapphire
West Coast Cocktail
INGREDIENTS
1 oz Bison Grass Vodka
1 oz Victoria Gin
½ oz Bianco Vermouth
1/3 oz Strega
METHOD
Combine ingredients in a mix glass, stir with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass.
Garnish with a Lox Rose - rolled lox on a skewer - but don't drop salmon in your glass until you are ready to serve. The salmon will start to cook from the alcohol as soon as it is added.
Source: Solomon Siegel of Solomon's in Victoria