Dune juniper grows in sand. It is the same family as the berry in every other gin but it lives in a harsher place, exposed to salt wind and thin soil, and plants under that kind of stress concentrate their oils. Black Pig picks it on the Alentejo coast, adds lemons from the same region and rosemary, and bottles at 40%.

Three ingredients means each has to carry a third of the bottle. The juniper is drier and more resinous than a cultivated berry, and it opens the aroma with real force rather than the polite pine of a supermarket gin. Alentejo lemon answers from above with a zest that is sharper and more aromatic than northern citrus, sunlight in a peel doing what shade cannot. Rosemary sits between them and is the piece that makes the recipe cohere: resinous enough to extend the juniper, floral enough to soften the lemon, and it takes the centre where a longer list would place a root or a spice. Nothing fills that space here, and the gap is deliberate. What you taste is exactly three things, arranged in order, with no fourth element blurring the edges.

A recipe this exposed cannot hide behind a mixer. Neutral tonic, ice right to the rim, and the ratio favouring the spirit so the juniper stays audible. Rosemary sits nearest the recipe as a garnish, and a lemon wedge does almost as well. Nothing flavoured, which would immediately become the fourth ingredient. Gold at Frankfurt in 2019 and Portugal Gin of the Year in Berlin in 2020 suggests the restraint reads as confidence rather than as thinness. Sand, salt wind and thin soil make a poor farm and an excellent argument for wild harvesting. A list of three leaves no room for a passenger. Wild harvesting cannot be scaled, which puts a ceiling on the whole enterprise. It ends resinous, citric and dry.