Jinzu Gin is a Scottish made, Japan inspired gin with an English woman at its heart. Designed by bartender Dee Davies for Diageo’s Show Your Spirit competition in 2013 (which it went on to win), the gin is a fantastic example of East meets West, with traditional gin botanicals joining cherry blossom, yuzu and sake to form a distinctive gin with a real sense of place.
Jinzu shares its name with the Japanese river that flows through the prefecture of Toyama, a city that sits on the Sea of Japan coast. The river is a site to behold, joined along its course by a thousand cherry blossom trees. Dee has been passionate about Japan and Japanese culture since visiting the country aged 16, so when the competition with Diageo came up, she leapt at the chance to join her two interests.
Once her idea was selected for the final, Dee was invited to Diageo’s World Innovation Centre, where she worked with Nicola Rowntree to turn the product from concept to liquid. They did this by making a compound gin with a juniper distillate and sake distillate and adding the other flavours as essences. Once they established what worked, they transferred this – through a process of trial and error – to a distilled recipe.
To make the gin, juniper, coriander and angelica are added to a neutral grain spirit in a traditional copper pot still. They are allowed to macerate for a short while before the cherry blossom and yuzu are added. There is no set amount of time for each run, rather the distillers will decide when to cut based on their knowledge of distillates, but it can take anywhere between two to two and a half hours.
The gin comes off the still at around 82%, and the Junmai sake – which is also made onsite – comes off at 60%. The two are blended and then watered down with demineralised Scottish water to bottling strength: 41.3%.
Fleshy citrus jumps to the fore on the nose, with the sake bringing an underlying sweetness. The cherry blossom carries a distinct floral note, but there’s a subtle juniper underpinning it all. Tasted neat, Jinzu Gin is mild, easy to sip and to hold on the tongue. It’s altogether quite unfamiliar as a spirit, though notably still a ginny with a long finish and a strong enough juniper backbone that carries all the way through to the aftertaste. The yuzu brings a fresh, mandarin-like citrus and the sake provides a creamy mouthfeel and a taste which bites right at the end. The cherry blossom, too, holds strong in the mouth – it’s not sweet and not herbal, rather it sits somewhere in-between.
Dee suggests green apple as her perfect garnish in a G&T – both because the acid in the fruit interacts well with the sake and because it makes a polite tip of the hat to her Somerset roots.