The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks (33 page)

Once the English got hold of gin, there was no stopping them. Juniper berries appeared as ingredients in English distillers' recipes in 1639. By the 1700s, unlicensed gin manufacture was legal in England, and crude and quite toxic gin replaced beer as the tipple of choice. A series of reforms led to more licensing and taxation of gin distilleries, and by the nineteenth century England began producing early versions of the excellent crisp, dry gins it is known for today.

Gin is really nothing more than a flavored vodka whose predominant flavor is juniper, so gin drinkers who say they won't drink vodka misunderstand the nature of their addiction. The base spirit itself is generally a mixture of barley, rye, and perhaps wheat or corn. The juniper and other flavorings can be macerated in the alcohol and redistilled, suspended in “botanical trays” in the still or extracted separately and mixed with the finished spirit. Each process extracts different oils from the plants and yields a different result.

Juniper spirit, made by fermenting juniper berries and water to create a juniper “wine” that is then distilled, is sometimes sold as juniper brandy in eastern Europe. St. Nicolaus distillery in Slovakia, for example, sells a juniper brandy as well as a spirit called Jubilejná Borovi ka that is bottled with a sprig of juniper. It is described as conveying the dubious “pleasure of drinking juniper twig.”

Some American distillers are experimenting with local junipers instead of turning to the traditional European sources. Bendistillery in Oregon harvests wild juniper berries for its gin; in fact, the owner says that the reason he started making gin was to put the Pacific Northwest juniper crop to use. Washington Island in Wisconsin is also home to a fine juniper crop; tourists can join juniper picking excursions for Death's Door, a popular local gin distillery.
However, not all junipers are suitable for harvest. The savin juniper (
J. sabina
), the ashe juniper (
J. ashei
), and the redberry juniper (
J. pinchotii
) are just three examples of toxic species; many others have simply not been studied for their potential toxicity. Anyone wishing to experiment with juniper infusions would be well advised to get
J. communis communis
from a reputable source.

Juniper berries are in short supply in England today owing to the loss of wild habitat and a failure to replant older stands. The conservation charity Plantlife UK has launched a campaign to save England's junipers, appealing to the British fondness for gin and tonics as a way to draw attention to their cause and encourage conservation and habitat restoration.

LEMON BALM

Melissa officinalis

lamiaceae (mint family)

W
hile this mint relative does smell strongly of lemon, the most common variety has a citronella note more reminiscent of lemon floor cleaner than anything that might taste good in a cocktail. The cultivar
Melissa officinalis
‘Quedlinburger Niederliegende' has the higher essential oil content that distillers prefer. Those oils include citral and citronellal, linalool, and geraniol, which gives it a slight rose geranium fragrance. The upper leaves and flowers are steam-distilled to extract this potent flavor, which goes into absinthe, vermouth, and herbal liqueurs. It is suspected to be one of the secret ingredients in both Chartreuse and Benedictine.

The genus name
Melissa
comes from the Greek word for “honeybee”; it gets this name because the tiny flowers are so attractive to bees.

LEMON VERBENA

Aloysia triphylla

verbenaceae (verbena family)

T
his wildly fragrant but otherwise unassuming shrub has a dramatic history. It arrived in Europe from its native Argentina in the 1700s but was never properly described in the botanical literature. A botanist named Joseph Dombey collected it again during an ill-fated expedition to Latin America in 1778 but ran into trouble in 1780 when he found himself in the middle of a Peruvian civil war. After surviving the war, a cholera outbreak, and a shipwreck, he made it to Spain in 1785, only to have his collection of rare plant specimens, representing years of work, detained in a customs warehouse until they rotted and died. One of the few plants that survived was lemon verbena. This time, his colleagues took note and the plant was at last properly identified and described.

Unfortunately, Dombey's troubles weren't over. The French government sent him on another expedition to North America, but this time he got as far as the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe before being arrested by the governor, who was still loyal to the monarchy and suspicious of the newly formed French republic that had organized Dombey's expedition. The explorer was able to clear his name, but he was ordered off the island, which suited his purposes anyway. However, his ship was almost immediately captured, probably by privateers working for the British government, and he was again thrown into prison on the nearby island of Montserrat, where he died in 1796.

A shot of verbena liqueur probably wouldn't have offered much consolation to Mr. Dombey, but the herbaceous perennial he helped introduce now lends a sweet, bright lemon flavor to many of the traditional green and yellow liqueurs of southern France and Italy, most notably Verveine du Velay, made by Pagès Védrenne in Le Puy-en-Velay in south-central France. It is also an ingredient in some Italian
amaro
s. On liquor bottles it might be identified as
verveine
in France and
cedrina
in Italy.