Orders ‘just exploded’ for Marlborough gin after being named world’s best

A Marlborough-made gin is hot property, to say the least, after being named world’s best on Friday.

The last few days had been a “ridiculous roller-coaster,” said Blenheim-based Elemental Distillers co-founder Ben Leggett, who got an email from the organisers of the World Gin Awards last week, alluding to the fact that the distillery may have won big.

After a few emails back and forth, Leggett said “the penny dropped” that Elemental Distillers’ Roots Marlborough Dry Gin had been voted the best London Dry Gin in the world, and he booked a last-minute flight to London to accept the trophy at the awards ceremony, held on Friday (NZ Time).

“At the moment, our celebration is very much all about just processing the inundation of communications that have come from both consumers and from trade sources, and trying to get a lot of orders out, that have just exploded,” Leggett said on Monday.

READ MORE:
* Marlborough man in high spirits as Blenheim-made gin named world’s best
* Climate Action Week: Distiller shares his unique practices
* Three of the best Kiwi gin distilleries to check out
* Craft gin distiller sets up in the heart of Marlborough wine country

“We’ve got a lot of gins to process, the first of our orders, a lot of emails to answer.

“I think I just need to level off really and try to get some sleep, and then I guess bounce off this as much as possible,” he said.

Their gin was one of around 3000 entries that entered into the London Dry Gin category at this year’s World Gin Awards, presented by Gin Magazine.

At the awards ceremony at London’s Waldorf Hilton hotel, Leggett said there were “super distillers from all around the world” in attendance.

“And the moment of real pride was knowing the fact that none of them had any idea of who we were, this tiny little two-man container distillery in Marlborough, and we were kind of sticking it to them a little bit, so that was awesome,” he said.

Since Elemental Distillers was founded in 2018, Roots Marlborough Dry Gin had picked up a number of other awards in its short history, including best gin overall at the 2021 NZ Spirits Awards, but Leggett said “nothing had been on the scale” of their latest trophy.

“Especially with different countries, because you’re dealing with completely different levels of competition, but this one just went absolutely crazy to be honest, and it’s the first year that we’ve entered into this one,” he said.

It was too early to know how the award would impact the scale of operations at the small distillery following their global recognition, but Leggett said their next steps would be focused on “leveraging (the win) in the right way”.

“You always need a platform to allow you to get that out there, and hopefully this will be exactly that, and we’ll start seeing some real big changes in the volumes, that’s the hope, but at the moment we’ve got to try and take stock of where that’s all looking,” he said.

“Gin is an exhausted market globally, especially in the UK and Europe … nobody is interested in importing another gin, unless you can really show that its rare and unique, and so hopefully this may help us, because it is such a rare award, to stand out amongst the crowd.”