Award winning Apothecary and herbalist, Amanda Saurin, is excited to announce the launch of her long anticipated organic botanical infusion drink, Wild Eve Recipe no 1.
This innovative, small batch non-alcoholic drink is hand crafted from an exclusive selection of organic flowers, fruits, leaves, and seaweeds, hand foraged on the Isle of Harris, in the Outer Hebrides ofScotland. The carefully blended botanicals assist to reduce stress, alleviate anxiety, and invite calmthrough the innate properties of the plants.
Incomparable to anything else on the market, Wild Eve is well thought out, rich and as intense as a really good alcoholic drink. It has heat, length, and real complexity with that moreish desire to keep on sipping. With the most extraordinary set of plants at the team’s disposal from mountain, machair meadow and sea, Amanda has used her learning from years of thinking, testing and coming to understand the best ways of extracting flavour, to craft her ‘magic in a bottle.’ It draws on decades ofacquiring plant knowledge, understanding plant medicine and a theory that plants, like essential oils for perfumery, can be categorised into top, middle and base notes to construct something really exciting.
Everything you taste in Wild Eve is pure plant, which is important not only because it means it is low in sugar, but plants offer the vitality and complexity that commercial extracts cannot. It’s only through the use of the actual plant that you can extract the full taste and active ingredients – for example rose, chamomile, oat and ashwagandha (the only ingredient that can’t be grown on the Isle of Harris…yet), in combination make you feel relaxed and calm, they all have amazing properties and centuries of use as stress busting, peace inviting plants, as well as extracting beautifully into water.
“We began with perfume; it may seem unusual but as a natural perfumer, I realised that drinks can be elevated to a whole different level by using perfume theory; introducing top notes for an initial burst of scent and flavour, giving way to the heart of the drink – the rich, floral and spice notes that give it complexity, finishing with the base notes, the long, deep, lingering taste that remains after the last sip is drunk. It works so perfectly allowing for highly unusual but complementary plant combinations. Itwas important to me to make a drink that had all the taste properties of alcohol, that made you feelchilled out like alcohol, that made you want to keep on sipping but which had no alcohol in any part of the process and which didn’t pretend to be an alcoholic substitute. It would stand alone as something you choose to drink because it would taste fantastic irrespective of its non-alcoholic status.” – Amanda Saurin, founder and Apothcarist.
The Process
The small local team that creates Wild Eve require time, skill, and a vigilant eye to spy the perfect picking stage – often abandoning their work to rush out on a fine day to collect the harvest. The weather on Harris makes the process particularly challenging, the plants are slower to emerge fromthe cold ground, slower to reach maturity and then much faster to dash to seed.
Besides the challenges, the weather on Harris is enchanting and crucial to the premium finish. Thewater is amongst the softest in Europe which allows the flavours of the foraged ingredients to develop without interruption. From the wild roses growing on the land to the sugar kelp hand dived in thepristine waters, to the chamomile and oats growing on the croft and the chilli plants that fill the windowsills, each of the botanicals are vital.
Drying the botanicals is a game of cat and mouse – the sudden rain requires quick release pegs tograb seaweeds off the line before dampening and delaying the sugars’ defining moments. Some plants require weeks of careful management to bring out the full flavor profile, some need to be cut small by hand to capture the taste, and others need heat or smoke to reveal themselves. Wild Eve is a dance with nature, born out of decades of learning and experience, captured in one wonderful drink.
The extracting processes are slow, gentle, and considered, where each plant is handled carefully and respectfully.
This means Wild Eve will not be found anywhere demanding volume production including large supermarket chains. Instead, Wild Eve is boutique, created in small, sustainable batches, to be purchased directly with the distillers or through carefully selected stores that share their ethos.
Available now at www.Wild-Eve.com
£32 (50cl)
