Five different woods, then a wooden egg. Citadelle Réserve spends around five months in French oak, acacia, mulberry, chestnut and cherry casks, each contributing a separate register, and the blend of all five is then rested again in a tall egg-shaped oak vat about 2.45 metres high. The shape drives a slow natural convection inside the wood, which keeps the components moving and integrating instead of settling.

The recipe underneath is Citadelle's nineteen botanicals with three more added for this bottling: yuzu, genepi and cornflower, bringing the total to twenty-two. They are distilled in small Charentais copper pot stills on a neutral French wheat spirit, by the progressive infusion method the house developed to draw each plant out when its own moment arrives. Maison Ferrand works in Cognac, and the whole approach reads like a brandy house applying its own habits to gin. Bottled at 45.2%.

The colour is pale gold and the nose is dry rather than sweet: wood, light tannin, juniper, toasted coriander seed, almond and other nuts, with citrus peel, dried flowers and a gentle cardamom-nutmeg-cassia spice behind. The barrel is unmistakably present and never covers the botanicals. On the palate pine and juniper lead, then warm spice, fennel, star anise and a yuzu-lifted citrus, with floral traces and a touch of liquorice root emerging as the glass opens. Medium-bodied, smooth, with a tannic grip closer to a lightly aged spirit than to a gin.

Serve it undiluted, or on one big cube, where the wood has room to speak. It also replaces a white or lightly aged spirit convincingly in an Old Fashioned, and holds up in a Hot Toddy, where the juniper and the dry oak both survive the heat entirely intact.