Green peppercorns are the unripe fruit, picked before they harden and preserved rather than dried, and they taste nothing like the black pepper they would have become: fresher, greener, more herbal and much less hot. Bigourdan uses them in a copper pot still a short walk from the Roman arena in Arles, at 46%.

Thirteen botanicals, and the recipe is organised around what grows in the south. Wild juniper opens forcefully, which the strength permits and a farmed berry would not deliver as clearly. Mediterranean citrus follows immediately, bright and clean across the top. Then the herbs take the middle, and they are the ones a Provençal kitchen would recognise: sage dry and dusty, savory sharper and more peppery, thyme resinous, lemon verbena lifting all three with a lemon note that comes from no fruit. Lavender cools them from above, fennel runs an aniseed thread underneath, and cardamom adds a camphorous lift. The green pepper sits through the middle of it all, aromatic rather than hot. Immortelle closes with a honeyed length: the last element to register and the slowest to go.

At 46% the glass carries a real mixer without losing the herbs. Neutral tonic, ice filled to the brim, and a firm pour. A sprig of thyme or savory follows the herbal centre; lemon peel follows the citrus opening. Nothing sweetened, since the immortelle already provides all the honey the recipe needs. Distilling in the middle of a city built by Rome is a detail that has nothing to do with the taste and everything to do with the place. A pepper picked green rather than left to ripen is a smaller decision than it looks, and it changes the whole middle of the palate. It closes herbal, peppery and honeyed.