Ask a master distiller what makes an exceptional spirit, and they will likely tell you it is a journey of artistry, craftsmanship and patience. More literally speaking, a premium spirit is defined by high-quality ingredients, careful distillation and a cask process. These are usually characteristics that apply to brown spirits such as whisky and cognac – but now the craft behind gin is being shown a deeper respect for the first time.

Gin has been long favoured by manufacturers as it is cheap and fast to produce. But in 2021, master distiller and Diageo’s former director of innovation Steve Wilson was called on by acclaimed photographer and longtime gin lover Mert Alas who was curious about creating his own take on the spirit – one that was far more elevated than anything he was able to find on the shelves.

Despite seemingly being from different worlds, they both shared a nuanced understanding of quality: part distiller and part brand builder, Wilson helped Diageo move into the luxury category at a time when the most premium spirit they had was Johnnie Walker Blue Label retailing at £120 a bottle. “He wanted to drink high quality gin and couldn't understand why nobody had ever done one. So the brief for me was really quite simple: can it be done? And my answer was, it can.”

Traditionally gin is made by mixing alcohol with botanicals and then vaporising and heating them altogether, with the resulting vape becoming the gin. But along with Wilson’s son, fellow distiller Anthony, Wilson and Alas deliberated how to “dial up the art”, as Wilson puts it. The three delved into the rarefied world of French perfume houses, visiting their laboratories to watch the perfumers at work, delicately extracting fractionates of botanicals for their fragrances. With both Wilson's former chemists, it was a familiar sight, but still they marvelled at the sensory abilities on show. “I take for granted after 20 years my ability to recognise smells and types and tastes and am able to categorise them quickly,” says Anthony Wilson. “[The perfumers] do all of that just through smell.”

They applied their learnings and decided to distil each botanical individually, allowing them to curate optimal levels of each one for their final formula. Along with the core gin ingredients, they eventually settled on hand-picked Damask rose, grapefruit peel, tea leaves and Albanian ivy. “It’s like an orchestra, Mert used to say,” Steve Wilson enthuses, revealing Alas’s former training in classical music and arts as a rich metaphor for the process. “You're looking at every single instrument and bringing those together so that what you end up with is a symphony where the sum of the parts is bigger than the parts themselves.”

There’s one botanical however that was worthy of a solo: an orchid cactus known as Queen of the Night, which only flowers once a year at night and wilts before dawn, which imparts a delicate jasmine-like flavour. So scarce was it that Wilson and Alas had to commission the National Cactus Library to cultivate it for them.

Distillation, of course, conjures up images of factories in which distillers carefully control temperature, pressure and time to transform raw ingredients into distinctive flavours and aromas - and all that is art in itself, according to Wilson.

“Distillation is a science, but the way spirits get distilled is more an art,” says the master distiller and Diageo’s former director of innovation Steve Wilson. “If it was a science, you'd have a computer sitting at the end of a still and you'd switch it on and the right stuff would come out of the end of it. Nobody distils like that. But you go to whisky or cognac distilleries, and there’s a distiller standing there while the liquid trickles out of the still – he’s smelling and tasting it, and then it goes into the wood and then it’s pulled out. That's art.”

Another important factor in the creation of a premium spirit involves resting of the liquid in casks– a process not normally involved in gin production, save for SEVENTY ONE. Once blended, the liquid is rested in casks for 71 nights –(identified as the precise duration needed to impart the wood’s qualities without erasing the delicate layering of botanicals – in a sequence of barrels including European virgin oak which provides freshness and greenness, sherry-saturated Spanish oak casks that create a sweetness and deep smokiness, and French oak casks that infuse the gin with the warmth, roundness and refinement of cognac. This step brings smoothness to the final liquid, softening the ‘spikes’ of the different flavour notes and creating a more homogenous product that is immediately recognisable as SEVENTY ONE. “It's like a living picture that's never finished,” says Anthony Wilson. “We just get to kind of tinker and play with it forever, and that for me as a blender is phenomenal.”

Ultimately, the proof of a luxury spirit is in the glass – and with a palate that is rich, sensorial and bracing, SEVENTY ONE is crafted to such a standard that it is best enjoyed neat.