Is gin in jeopardy?

MONTREAL – Juniper berries, one of the vital ingredients in gin, may be facing a crisis.

A British charity has sounded the alarm after it realized that juniper bushes have disappeared from over a third of Britain where they were previously found.

Juniper expert Deborah Long is a program manager for Plantlife, a wild plant conservation charity based in Scotland.

She has been researching juniper bushes for almost ten years.

“It’s actually quite a widely spread shrub, it’s quite Catholic in its tastes,” she noted.

“If you get a distribution map from across the world, juniper will crop up in most places.”

But like most wild plants, it struggles for survival in the face of spreading ubanization, pressures like habitat fragmentation and changes in land use, as well as over and under grazing.

But juniper plant populations are also ageing, and just like with humans, getting older comes with its own set of health issues.

“The older juniper bushes get, the fewer viable berries they produce.”

The charity recently discovered that juniper faces another threat: a new deadly fungal disease called Phytophthora austrocedrae.

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Juniper bushes infected with the fungus have been found in the U.K., Patagonia and possibly Eastern Europe.

“We don’t really know how it gets from site to site and we don’t really know why it attacks some juniper bushes and not other ones,” noted Long.

“But in a hundred years or so, we’ll no longer have any juniper.”

Cue a social media crisis:

In fact, a world without juniper berries could have a significant impact on gin production.

“Technically speaking, gin must be made with juniper berries to be called gin. (The name comes from jenever). It would definitely be a scandal,” said Montreal mixologist, Lawrence Picard.

He noted that there are very few Scottish disilleries that use local juniper – with one exception.

“The Botanist gin whose master distiller chooses Islay juniper, for example, makes it quite a unique product.”

Canadian gin producer Peter Hunt, a master distiller at Victoria Spirits in British Columbia agrees that the possibility of no more juniper is a worry, especially for micro-distilleries.

“Certainly it’s something to be concerned about,” he said.

“There’s been a real explosion in gin production with micro-distilleries starting up – and when a distillery starts up, it’s usually with clear spirits that aren’t aged.”

Like many other gin distilleries, Victoria Spirits doesn’t source it’s juniper berries from Scotland, it finds its berries in Eastern Europe in places like Bulgaria, Albania and Croatia. Hunt said that using local juniper berries can be challenging, as the varieties and flavours vary.

And although there hasn’t been official sightings of the fungus in Europe, Deborah Long noted that she’s already received an email from a person in Estonia who described what seem to be the symptoms of infected plants there.

Nevertheless, Picard remains positive.

“There are so many products dependent on the existence of juniper that the the industry wouldn’t allow for its extinction. Just like for Agave Azul in tequila, juniper will benefit from contemporary science when facing serious extinction.”