From http://www.goodhousekeeping.co.uk/food/food-news/gin-trends
We really are a nation that LOVES gin. So much so, that latest stats show that gin sales surpassed the £1billion mark at the end of last year. Yep, us Brits really are obsessed with the juniper-based spirit…
And while the gin aficionados among us may have mastered the perfect G&T, are we clued up on the biggest gin trends of the future?
We spoke to Olivier Ward, co-founder of Gin Foundry and general gin genius about all things, well, gin.
He gave us his six gin drinking predictions for 2018 and beyond – including what types we’ll be drinking, to how we’ll be drinking it…
1. Gin and wine
Yep – two of our favourite tipples combined! Olivier is a passionate believer in the gin and wine-making industries coming together – and believes 2018 will be the year that happens. And he doesn’t mean people drinking gin and wine from the same glass…
‘You can look at this in different ways,’ he tells us. ‘There are wine-makers becoming gin-makers, and there are a lot of gin-makers looking at how wine-makers do things and adopting practices and philosophies from the wine-making territories.’
For example, there are gin-makers that are using grape based spirits to produce gin, and distillers who are cutting the gin alcohol with wine rather than water to get it down to bottling strength.
‘There are even gin distillers looking at using the wine-makers approach of bottling a vintage,’ he says. ‘And people using red wine barrels like Bordeaux, Burgundy and port to add the wine influence to their gin distilling.’
A great example of this is Four Pillars Bloody Shiraz gin that mixes Shiraz grapes with dry gin, and Ferdinand’s Saar Gin which is infused with semi-sweet Riesling after distillation.