Up Craft Spirits has launched Ginout, an innovative Portuguese Gin that is being called the world’s first to be “aged from the inside out.” The new brand is a venture between award-winning distiller Barney Wilczak and rising cake designer Catia Mesquita.
‘‘To create something unique is an exercise in vision and skill,” explains Wilczak. “To make a gin that was expressive, balanced and yet didn’t conform to any current template demands a different approach.’’
The Gin is made using a combination of two ageing techniques. The first technique sees the liquid aged in traditional Port barrels, and the second utilises Portuguese cork alongside a range of botanicals that takes drinkers on a journey through some of Portugal’s most important habitats, from forests to olive groves and terraced vineyards to the sea.
Ginout expresses an entire landscape of flavors and aromas. High notes of conifer buds evoke sun-touched forest canopy. Aging with cork, toasted to different temperatures to highlight different elements of this vitally important tree, brings out hints of smoke, vanilla, sun warmed wood and gorse like coconut. Wild Peony flowers grown in Portugal add high and delicate floral notes. Olive oil sourced from Catia’s home in the Algarve provides an herbaceous understory as well as a textural layering. The influence of tawny Ports bring autumnal notes, rich and filled with wild berries. The forest floor offers cocoa, humus rich fig leaves, and sweetness. Finally, Flor de Sal, with its own unique appellation in the Algarve, brings a minerality that makes the whole sparkle.
It is believed that this is the first time cork has been used as a botanical to age spirits, using the natural material’s potential to enrich a Gin.
In the packaging, the brand looks to show respect to its environment and the distillation. It uses hand printed and applied libels on carbon neutral paper and natural cork. It is hand bottled with no chill filtration.
The bottles are currently on sale for €38.00 ($46 USD) and can be purchased via adegga.