St. George Terroir Gin

Pine, herbaceous, floral

A unique Gin but has a heavy pine needle aroma and taste. Not a Gin you’ll use for your typical Gin and Tonic.

Definitely unique - honestly tastes like liquified pine needles. Fairly heavy heat for a gin. The pine taste is a bit overpowering.

Initially, I wasn’t too wild about this gin. I work in a paint store and all I could think of with each sip was “this is straight-up turpentine.” However, after a bit, the shock of pine resin was over and I was able to explore the different botanicals hidden beneath the surface. Still very woody, but you get snippets of the volatile oils of sage and bay laurel—especially the sage as the rest of the botanicals fade. In college I had a field biology class where we took hikes around the California Bay Area and were able to sample the local flora like bay laurel, manzanita berry, huckleberry, and black sage. This gin takes me back to those hikes, but it’s still hard to get past the initial shock as the turpentine hits my tongue. I’m glad I’ve got a small bottle, as this won’t be my go-to gin. I’m glad I have tried something so far apart from the average, but it’s just kind of too much to handle at once.

Nose: Pine needles, cypress sprigs, casurina needles, sage, thyme, bay leaf, cassia bark, fresh-sawn fir and cedar planks. Astonishingly herbal and coniferous - exactly like the aromas of a pine plantation. [Interestingly, the dry glass aroma loses most of the pine notes and is strongly lavender and rose, like their Botanivore gin]. Palate: Pine resin. Bay leaf. Sage. Finish: Medium/long. Sweet pine resin flavours that linger into the aftertaste. Ideosyncratic in the extreme. You'll either love this or hate it. The nose is so piney it's hard to believe, and that character translates directly into the palate. I kept thinking I was tasting a pine-tree resin liqueur, it's so piney - in fact it's piney to the point of being a caricature. With tonic it tasted like the same gin with a veneer of tonic on top. There was no integration at all which is odd considering the stablemate Botanivore gin meshes so closely with tonic. It's not to my taste, but I can see the attraction and the distillery deserves credit for taking a chance on something novel. You could reasonably rate it as anything from 75 to 90 points, depending on how well it suits your palate, but the quality of distillation is unquestionably high. "Average" : 75/100 (2.5 stars)