BEST OF BRITISH Gin
In our ongoing series highlighting delicious produce around the country, we meet the artisans and farmers helping to bring it to our tables. This month:
Walter Riddell is crouching in the heather on a Northumberland hillside. “Monica Berg planted this one,” he says, inspecting the name tag tied to a young juniper bush. Monica Berg, for those not steeped in the cocktail world, is a superstar mixologist. That she has been enticed from her uber-cool bar in London to plant a fledgling shrub beneath the remote Simonside Hills speaks volumes about the pulling power of Hepple Gin, the spirit that Walter produces here on the 4,000-acre estate that he and his family call home.
“This is where I’ve always come to be happy,” says Walter of the landscape where he grew up, explaining how he was inspired to capture its wildness and beauty in a bottle. The story of Hepple Gin, he says, is complicated. This isn’t just another craft spirit with a strong sense of place – despite being distilled in a converted coach house in the grounds of his ancestral home using botanicals from the upland heath that rises above his back garden.
“It tastes like a classic gin, but it is made in a radical new way,” Walter says. The reason top bartenders seek out Hepple Gin, he continues, is that he and his partners have built a thoroughly modern distillery here to extract the maximum flavour from one essential indigenous ingredient. “Many gins have moved away from juniper,” Walter says. “We wanted to make it sing.”
INSPIRED BY SAUSAGES
The first bottles of Hepple Gin went on sale in 2015, but its genesis began in 2010 when Walter inherited the Hepple Estate. “We wanted to bring up our own family here,” he says. Walter resigned from his lucrative job at an investment bank, and he and his wife, Lucy, moved north from Dorset with their four children. Now, they just had to make the estate financially viable. It was a challenge. Hepple’s 3,000 acres of upland heath – much of it protected – and 1,000 acres of rough pasture and woodland were not profitable farming land. “There were no sources of income from this place. How could we make money here without destroying it?” says Walter today.
Inspiration came from his childhood friend Valentine Warner, the chef and food writer. As boys, the two had spent holidays damming streams and smoking sausages at Hepple using firewood from the spiky evergreen that clung to the hillside in clumps. “I had always associated juniper with something that made our sausages taste delicious,” Walter says. Valentine suggested these aromatic bushes could be the key to their future. He brought two industry contacts to Hepple: leading bartender and consultant Nick Strangeway and his business partner Cairbry Hill, an expert in dis
