GauGin Classic

Over the past few weeks there has been a flurry of posts featuring the latest offering from GauGin. Having already released two flavours GauGin I (orange,) and GauGin II (lemon,) these posts were relating to GauGin Classic. The gin has been getting an excellent response online and I honestly couldn’t believe my luck when I was contacted by a friend and fellow ginthusiast who knew the owners of GauGin and wondered if I fancied trying a bottle…

“YES PLEASE!!”

…well I was hardly going to say no, was I?

The GauGin project was launched in 2015 on an estate in the village of Gaucin, Andalusia by Belgian born Paul Van den Heuval. Paul manages a 16 hectare farm which is home to many plants and trees, including lemon, orange, lavendar, rosemary, sage and thyme and bees. Born from an initial desire to create beer, it was only after realising that the brewing of honey beer was not maintainable “due to the unreliable production of honey” (apparently bees aren’t too great at honey production on command,) that the idea for gin came about. The experimenting began with different combinations of fruit, spices and that elusive honey and before long he created GauGin, in not only one, but two flavours. Lemon and orange obviously feature heavily in the original two flavours, but other botanicals include juniper, lavender, wild rosemary, wild sage and wild thyme.

What about GauGin Classic, I hear you cry. Well, after a 20 month development process this London Dry Gin was crafted to have a classic British style with a juniper forward taste, supplemented with fresh fruit and mediterranean herbs which are subtle in the finish. Would you believe it, GauGin Classic uses grapefruit as on of it’s botanicals, a winner for me, which obviously made it sound mouthwateringly, thirst quenchingly delicious. Not only that, but I was pretty sure it would be a gin that both Hubby and I would actually agree on.

In next to no time my package arrived and I eagerly opened it up.

Unfortunately Hubby was out when my delivery arrived, meaning I had to do the tasting alone…what a shame!

Bottle open and the first thing which hit me was the beautiful hit of lemon which was released, powerful but not too overbearing. To taste, GauGin Classic has a beautiful flavour, full of citrus and herb which is surprisingly soft. I paired it with Merchant’s Heart Light Tonic Water, (I’m a little bit in love with Merchant’s Heart at the moment,) garnished, as suggested with a touch of lemon peel and WOW! What a combination, what a gin and tonic!

I knew Hubby would love it, so had one waiting for him when he got home from work. His reaction was one I wish I’d recorded. Lots of WOW, OOO, POW and YEAH and I think he finished with a combination of them all which went something like this…

“Wow, urgh, yeah, banging…this is a banging gin!”

We’re now experimenting with different garnish combinations so see what flavours we can bring out and enhance and we are definitely going to need to buy another bottle fairly soon and we appear to be running out of it very quickly, to the point where I am now actually rationing it out! Even more impressively, I am yet to find someone who dislikes this gin after trying it…

Thank you GauGin for coming up with something so delicious. Thank you to my fellow ginthusiast for hooking me up with such a fabulous treat. Finally, I’d like to say a big thank you to those bees for not being able to produce enough honey on command for beer, because without them, we may not have any of these gins at all!