Buckwheat is a Breton field crop, not a perfume plant, and seeing it on a botanical list is a surprise. It is nevertheless what gives La Roche Sauvage its least expected dimension: a cereal and nutty note, dry and discreet, unlike anything a root or a peel contributes. Distillerie Ar Roc'h distils it at La Roche-Jaudy, in the Tregor, at 40%.

Four plants hold the green side around it. Sage brings a herbal bitterness and a faintly camphorous floor. Borage, rarer in a still than buckwheat, gives a fresh vegetal nuance close to cucumber. Geranium adds a precise floral layer, green rather than sweet, which keeps the whole thing out of the vegetable patch. Juniper holds the resinous line that a London Dry must, and nothing at all is added after distillation: no sugar, no flavouring.

The nose reads cleanly. Juniper announces itself first, then the green and quietly floral impressions of geranium and borage, with an edge of wild herbs and that dry cereal note underneath. The attack is firm on the palate, sage and borage occupying the middle, geranium lays down its flower, and the buckwheat arrives last with a lightly toasted roundness. The finish is persistent, mineral and a little peppery, and the nuttiness stays in it.

A neutral tonic and a restrained garnish, a sprig of herb, or apple cut thin and green, keep all of it legible; anything sweetened blunts the cereal note first, which is the one worth protecting. It holds up in a Martini or a Gimlet too, where the earthy floor has room to speak. Brittany is usually distilled as a coastline, all salt and seaweed and cliff. Looking inland instead, at a crop that has fed the region for centuries, produces a gin that could not have come from anywhere else and does not smell of the sea at all.