Monkey 47 Distiller's Cut 2024
Capers; Capparis!
So this bit is just for the absolute newbies. Everyone else is already well aware of our motto “same same, but different”, so we’ll just summarise it briefly here: botanical curiosity, obsessive pursuit of unparalleled quality, numerous expeditions on the hunt for unexpected aromas, Species Rara – et voilà, MONKEY 47 Distiller’s Cut!
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Last year we found what we were looking for 7.000 kilometres away – in Canada, to be precise whereas this year we came across our 48th ingredient while having dinner at our favourite Italian restaurant right around the corner.
How did we manage that? Well, with an absolute classic dish: pasta with anchovies and capers. But let’s take things one step at a time. As we were enjoying the capers, we soon realised that they provide a fine symphony of flavours and are more than just a garnish for a tried-and-tested recipe. We don’t like to hang about, so in no time at all we set off in search of the best of its kind and ended up on the small, enchanting volcanic island of Pantelleria, right in the middle of the Strait of Sicily in the Mediterranean.
More specifically, we found ourselves at La Nicchia di Pantelleria, a farm that has specialised in producing capers since all the way back in 1949. After the death of the founders Antonio and Girolamo, their sons took over the legacy of their fathers’ painstaking and treasured work and entrusted it to Gabriele Lasagni, who has carried out extensive studies and research into the raw materials found on Pantelleria and today runs La Nicchia with great passion.
The caper bushes grow here in their ideal climate, bedecked with fleshy leaves, while the pale pink flowers, sometimes with hues of purple, make the rather robust shrub appear almost delicate.
The fruit looks like a berry, with purple seeds and bright red flesh; this is the caper berry, which is actually the shoot before it turns into a flower.
The closed flower bud is harvested shortly before it blooms and is immediately placed in salt, dehydrated and the water is removed. This first salting is crucial for developing that typical, tangy and slightly pungent flavour. For the second salting, which helps with the maturing process, the capers are skimmed off batch by batch, transferred to fresh vats and left in the new salt for around a month with daily mixing. This is how the small capers from Pantelleria get their unique and distinctive flavour: nutty, pure and elegant, with a pronounced sweetness and an intense aroma. It’s really a perfect match for our distillate in both flavour and aroma.
The rinsed capers were added to our specially developed, complex and lengthy maceration and distillation process to produce our exclusive Distiller’s Cut, which we make only once a year. It epitomises our ambition to push the boundaries of what is possible when carefully selected botanicals are crafted into a limited edition product that touches the senses and makes the hearts of bartenders and gin lovers beat faster.
The MONKEY 47 Distiller’s Cut 2024 is a spicy and elegant dry gin, with a hint of the sea, sweetly nutty, against a background of exceptional density and complexity. It is a remarkable flavour experience, and not only for those who want to think themselves away onto that small volcanic island in the Mediterranean. Cheers!
Discover more about our partner La Nicchia
La Nicchia has been a caper farm and food workshop on the island of Pantelleria since 1949. It handles everything from farming to processing capers, utilising all parts of the caper plant—buds, caperberries, leaves and sprouts. This complete vision of the production chain and its deeply rooted idea that it “could learn to make the best out of what the island had to offer, without being fooled by simplistic market principles” has made it a sui generis farming company and the only one on the island with a complete production chain.
