Award winning apothecary and herbalist Amanda Saurin has launched 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.
She believes it’s the perfect tonic for the new year, saying the carefully blended botanicals assist to reduce stress, alleviate anxiety, and invite calm through the innate properties of the plants.
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 of acquiring plant knowledge, understanding plant medicine and a theory that plants, like essential oils for perfumery, can be categorised into top, middle and base notes.
Amanda said: ‘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.
‘It was important to me to make a drink that had all the taste properties of alcohol, that made you feel chilled 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.’
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. It is available now at Wild-Eve.com, £32.
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