At last, trendy gins are tasting like gin again

I blame my mother. Although gin wasn’t her ruin, I have to admit, she did enjoy a gin and tonic. And as any student of the spirits industry will tell you, you never drink what your parents drink. The problem, I now realise, was that gin in the 1970s wasn’t very good. Tonic water was even worse: the primary aim of even the best known (Ssssssh — you know who you are) being to disguise the roughness of the gin. And vice versa, I suppose. Gin was dying on its feet, being replaced by the infinitely cooler vodka, which clever advertising in the 1970s had transformed from the equivalent of grappa into the current generation’s choice. It also had the advantage, worry-ingly to my mind, that it tasted of nothing and therefore allowed pimply youths like me to get pissed without having to get the taste (and the respect) for alcohol in the first place. And then Gordon’s reduced their strength without reducing their price, and the downward spiral had begun — albeit disguised in the minds of the spirits industry as ‘managing for value’. In other words: think quantity before quality, and make as much money as possible before the punters wake up to the fact that they’re being duped and decide to switch to drinking something else entirely. I remember going to New York for the first time in 1981, and noticing that the decline of gin was on a different cycle in the States. The most visible brand on the shelves came in an old-fashioned green bottle with a portrait of Queen Victoria on it, and was called Bombay Gin. It seemed to me that gin still had an appeal to the knickerbocker class of American, who wore tweed and called people ‘old boy’. But fast forward ten years or so, and some brilliant employee of Diageo transformed Bombay Gin into Bombay Sapphire, and gin was on the road to recovery.