My Sherry Amore...

The Cotswold name is applied to everything from anoraks to mattresses that have little to do with our limestone hills. So isn’t it time we got into the fortified wine business?

- Adam Edwards

I dropped into a fashionable pub outside Cirencester last week and, just to ring the changes, I asked for a schooner of dry sherry. If I had requested a glass of Mateus Rose and a few cheese and pineapple nibbles there would have been less of a guffaw.

“Are you sure you don’t want a Babycham?” said one local. “On it’s way, vicar,” shouted another.

If, instead, I had ordered a Cotswold Gin with a Fever Tree Tonic I would have been as cool as a hipster’s beard. A decade ago a request for a particular brand of gin would have led the barman to believe I was a lunatic pretending to be a pre-war Colonel in the Raj. But today gin is a sacrament to be fawned over. There are, for example, over 80 different designer gins currently on sale according to the Drinks Business Magazine. That excludes Scruff Gin made by Toby Fairbrother in the Archers, but includes Cotswold Gin distilled with “nine carefully considered botanicals”.

“Knowing your cucumber from your liquorice botanicals is now akin to knowing your merlot from your shiraz,” reported the Times earlier this year. That’s as maybe, but I would just as soon drink supermarket own brand cooking gin as any of the fancy new breeds. A spirit is drunk for the buzz not the bouquet.