To enter the realm of The Fynoderee, please confirm you are of legal drinking age in your country of residence:
or No thanks.To enter the realm of The Fynoderee, please confirm you are of legal drinking age in your country of residence:
or No thanks.
It takes the best part of a year to make Fynoderee Sloe Gin. The journey begins with the autumn harvest and ends the following autumn, when the finished gin is ready to be bottled.
As the days grow shorter and colder, we head out into the Isle of Man's countryside in search of one of autumn's most prized wild fruits: the humble sloe.
Sloes are the small, dark berries of the blackthorn, a thorny shrub commonly found growing in hedgerows across the island. The berries are notoriously difficult to harvest as they grow tucked among a tangle of large woody thorns. Picking them takes patience, determination and, more often than not, an arm full of scratches.
Blackthorn only produces a good crop when weather and growing conditions are just right, so a good harvest is never guaranteed. And then there's the question of where to find them. Experienced island foragers tend to keep the locations of their best sloe bushes a closely guarded secret. We're certainly not about to give away ours!
On the moonlit nights of autumn, the Frost Faerie creeps through the island's hedgerows, her icy breath whitening the leaves and her frosty spear piercing the heart of every sloe berry she finds…
Our Frost Faerie brings a touch of Manx magic to our Sloe Gin, her icy spear symbolising the age-old tradition of waiting until the first winter frost before picking sloes. The freezing temperatures soften the berries’ tough skins, allowing their deep colour and rich, fruity flavour to infuse more readily into the gin.
Waiting for nature's first frost, however, can be a gamble. Leave the berries on the bushes too long and they risk spoiling or being lost to the elements. So we give the Frost Faerie a helping hand.
Once harvested, our wild Manx sloes are carefully prepared and frozen to recreate the effect of that first frost, before being steeped in our Winter Gin for five months.
While the sloes bring their own distinctive character, the gin they steep in is just as important.
For our Sloe Gin, we use a blend of Fynoderee Winter Gin, distilled in our traditional copper stills using a carefully selected blend of botanicals, including blackberries, orris root, cinnamon, ginger and cloves.
The rich fruit notes and warming spices provide a natural companion to the wild Manx sloes, complementing their deep, fruity character and helping create the wonderfully rounded flavour of our finished Sloe Gin.
With the sloes prepared and the gin ready, the two finally come together.
We leave the fruit to steep slowly in the gin over the months that follow, allowing the sloes to gradually release their deep ruby colour and rich fruit flavours into the spirit. As time passes the flavours develop and deepen, bringing the fruit and gin together to create the luxuriously rich taste of Fynoderee Sloe Gin.
There's no rushing this part. It's a gradual transformation that takes time, allowing the character of the sloes to develop within the spirit.
Every harvest is different, shaped by what the island's hedgerows have to offer. As a result, no two vintages of our Sloe Gin are ever quite the same. Each captures its own distinct character of the season.
By the following autumn, almost a year after we first ventured into the Manx countryside in search of those elusive little berries, our Sloe Gin is finally ready to be bottled.
The Making of Autumn, a journey from land to bottle.
There are summers that seem to disappear in a flash, and this has definitely been one of them. Looking back, it feels like Team Fyn has barely stood still. We’ve travelled from one end of the Island to the other, been involved in weddings, community events and poured more drinks than we can count and we've loved every minute of it.
There’s a moment every year when you know TT has arrived. The roads change, bikes seem to appear everywhere, old friends return, new faces arrive and there’s that unmistakable buzz around the Island. We love it. But this year, even by TT standards, things felt a little different.
