Why a gin maker invented its own history

By Tom Vanderbilt

With its squat profile and white rhomboid label decorated with juniper branches, a bottle of Hendrick’s gin looks like it has been plucked from a Victorian apothecary. The impression is reinforced by the date on the bottle: “Est. 1886”. This is accurate in one, slightly misleading sense. Hendrick’s is produced at a venerable distillery, William Grant & Sons, which opened in Scotland over a century ago. But the brand itself was launched in 1999, the result of a collaboration between a whisky company and Steven Grasse, an adman from Philadelphia known for his outspoken personality. “Craft distilleries are like assholes,” he once said. “Everyone’s got one, and what comes out of them tastes like shit.”

Grasse’s first ambition was to work in film and the world he helped to create with Hendrick’s is indeed cinematic – in a whimsical sort of way. The packaging and advertising depicts a 19th-century dreamscape of walrus-mustachioed men playing lawn sports; of penny-farthings and cabinets of curiosity; of cucumber-shaped dirigibles.