A Taste Of Monaco

The principality's only distillery has teamed up with Prince Albert on a new gin.

- Mark Ellwood

EVERY WINTER, THE bitter orange trees that line the main boulevards in Monte Carlo burst with fruit, which Philip Culazzo remembers vividly from his childhood visits to Monaco. “They look like Christmas baubles, but really fragrant—they’ve never been treated with chemicals,” he says of these urban citrus groves, a throwback to an earlier era when the principality still owned swathes of nearby farmland. But the adult Culazzo, who owns a seafood-trading company, was startled to learn the fate of these fruits. All but a handful of the 15,000kg produced by the 600 or so trees was simply incinerated, wasted like a delicious inconvenience. Wondering why it couldn’t be put to good use, he sourced a handful of oranges and started dabbling in distilling on the weekends, using equipment he’d bought as a hobbyist.